IF LIFE SEEMS MEANINGLESS, HERE ARE 7 PATHS OUT
Article by LiveReal Agents Blake and Thomas
It’s possible to overcome a sense of life being meaningless.
“How?” is the question.
Answering that involves an old truism: to solve a problem, first understand it.
When we step back and take a clear look at the grand scheme of things, one classic approach is to see our life as being on a kind of “path.”
It started at birth, & so far has led – well, here.
But where does that “path” lead?
Sometimes, in our darker moments, it can seem like we’re on a path to nowhere.
Or, at least, nowhere good. A swamp, maybe, or a trash dump, or a field of poison ivy, or a sheer cliff, or a pile of dust. Or, maybe it simply goes nowhere – it just wanders, endlessly, or leads back to itself, going in circles.
Some see this as a problem. (“I don’t want to end up in a field of poison ivy.”) Others say, “Just enjoy the trip to the field of poison ivy.” Others say, “The path doesn’t lead to poison ivy – it leads somewhere much, much better. I hope.” And so on. There are floods of conflicting opinions, all based on our individual answers to the Big Questions.
It’s a problem humanity has struggled with throughout all of recorded history.
(Here’s a brief overview of that struggle, and here is a less brief overview of “the meaning problem” itself.)
Everyone faces this problem.
We might "face" it directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, in a hand-to-hand confrontation or by running away from it every chance we get.
But a key question:
Does this perspective of “the path” offer an accurate view of the world?
How objectively true is our answer?
When we confront the problem in this way, are we seeing the world properly? Could the “path of life” seriously lead somewhere - or nowhere - like this? And if so, doesn’t the project of “seeing the world accurately” seem like an entirely unpleasant experience, best avoided?
It’s one of the key existential riddles we face.
Each of us is tasked with solving it.
It’s “the problem of meaning.”
We’re on a kind of “path” in life. And the intelligent approach, it seems, is to at least ask where the “path” leads.
After all, what is the point?
Sometimes there really doesn’t seem to be one.
Life is hard. Just breathing involves a struggle for oxygen.
Life can sometimes seem filled with suffering.
And not just suffering, but pointless suffering. Misery without apparent reason can be an unwelcome houseguest to the poor and the rich, the tall and the short, the brainy and the simple.
We can sometimes grow up imagining that life will only get better and better as we get older, only to eventually realize that much of it was an illusion based on hope.
We also long desperately for significance that often seems elusive. There’s a haunting fear that we might live and die without anyone ultimately caring or even noticing. Some misguided individuals even decide to do something terrible just to “make a mark on history” or “change the world” (even for the worse) or get a Wikipedia page – because then, they imagine, they’ll matter (as if Wikipedia or academic historians had been deemed the official referees of cosmic significance). And not mattering seems even worse than being hated; being infamous can seem better than being unknown.
And of course, our final destination and identity can appear to be a forgotten pile of dust.
Meaninglessness is one of the most formidable existential monsters we face.
Yet we sometimes find ourselves utterly unprepared to face it.
We can easily find ourselves facing it armed only with a plastic spork, a headful of random facts, and skills at doomscrolling.
We’re taught to categorize leaves or the parts of a cell, but not the point of the life we live.
As Richard Rose once said, “We breed, without knowing why we breed.”
If life is a game, or a kind of game-of-games, we often find ourselves without a rulebook, yet tasked with making a few “right” moves in a highly complex situation.
The point is, as D. T. Suzuki might say, “there are definitely things justifying pessimism.” Or that the point of it all isn’t necessarily obvious, clear, or certain.
Sounds like a job for LiveReal.
The situation described above typically doesn’t sit well with us.
“The Problem” here is obvious.
When we face these four horsemen of suffering, insignificance, relentless struggle, and impermanence, it’s a problem. Most of us tend not to enjoy suffering very much. We want to be significant – to matter – in the grand scheme of things. We wish life weren’t so difficult, so often. And the idea of death bugs us, and can even haunt us.
Of course, some folks can take pride in being able to “take it.” They can even enjoy flexing their existential toughness, staring right into the abyss without flinching.
Yet that doesn’t change the prior sense that something seems off.
And “off” in a profound way.
We often can’t shake the nagging sense that something in this situation runs against the grain of our deepest intuitions.
How do we resolve it?
To be clear, it isn’t necessarily an easy problem to solve.
It isn’t even necessarily easy to recognize it as a problem.
It often flows under the surface, undetected. We might sense it only indirectly, by its symptoms – and blame it on certain external factors like our coworkers, our politicians, or the dog. It’s like an invisible, odorless gas. Many suffer from it without really knowing it. Few ever put words to it.
It also isn’t a straightforward problem.
It isn’t like math.
“What’s 2+2?” typically has one clear, objective, public, and universal solution.
If “the answer” to meaninglessness was like that – “It’s 4! Problem solved!” – this territory would be much easier to navigate.
But it isn’t.
Existential problems often seem muddy, subjective, private, and unique to each individual. This often results in flimsy platitudes-as-guiding-lights (“You do you! Good luck!”) and leaves each of us to wrestle with thorny existential riddles entirely on our own.
Progress in areas like physics, chemistry, and engineering seems obvious. We’ve gotten better at these things over time. We’ve figured things out.
In areas like meaning and meaninglessness, on the other hand (as anyone who has read Plato knows), we aren’t necessarily better off than we were thousands of years ago.
But with the right approach, we can clarify things significantly.
The first step can be small but decisive.
We can first admit that sustained hopelessness eventually collapses into nihilism.
And nihilism isn’t a sturdy worldview.
We can acknowledge that, as Richard Rose once said, “futility is futile.”
And beyond being futile, it might also be mistaken.
We can ask again: how can we solve it?
Here are seven options.
(1) Inquire: Embark on a Search for Meaning
The basic idea: the meaning of my life is to find the meaning of life.
The premise is that a sense of meaninglessness might not tell the whole story.
The aim, then, is to find “the whole story.”
It means embarking on a quest.
Call it a “working solution.” It might be like an interim ruler who agrees to rule temporarily until a formal election is held. It will do for now.
This approach can become self-fulfilling. The search for meaning itself can become meaningful.
This doesn’t mean it’s mere wishful thinking. A search for meaning doesn’t presume that it’ll find meaning.
But even the process of searching for an answer can play a critical role in starting a process, launching a ball that eventually rolls downhill. Even the decision alone that “the meaning of my life is to find the meaning of life” can fill us with purpose, aim, direction, and value.
The “objective” of the “mission” (or the “hypothesis” for the more scientifically-minded) is to test the hypothesis that meaninglessness isn’t an accurate description of reality. (See #5 below.) Life or the universe itself isn’t some cosmic mistake or story without a point. There has to be something more. But what is that “something more”?
The theory is that there does seem to be an Answer. We just haven’t discovered it yet.
The challenge is to seek, and find.
(2) Direct Revelation
Sometimes an experience can solve the meaning problem.
It can be an experience that occurs on a certain day or night, at a particular time, and at a specific place.
It might be as simple as a private “aha” moment.
It could also be a powerful, dramatic, life-changing spiritual experience or even awakening.
Many people have experienced these.
Some exercises or experiments can help bring them about. These can be incorporated as a contemplative practice or as a way of life.
One example of an experience that solved the problem of meaninglessness for one person is described here.
(3) Secondhand Revelation
“Secondhand revelation” involves one or more individuals having a direct revelation and telling others about it.
Those others hear it, believe it, and act accordingly.
Secondhand revelations might seem less desirable than firsthand. But they also enjoy certain advantages.
Firsthand revelations can be rare. They can also be confusing, disturbing, or bewildering. We can misinterpret them or communicate them poorly. The lessons we draw from them can be misapplied. They might lead to ego-inflation, self-negation, fanaticism, or worse. They can lead some to believing they’ve reached the summit when they’re merely left base camp. And so on.
The point is, direct revelation alone is no guarantee of future success.
The list of gurus, preachers, and sages who declared themselves “enlightened” (saints, sinless, saved, messengers of the Almighty, etc) and then went on to future scandal isn’t short.
Seeing value in secondhand revelation also isn’t difficult.
The barrier to entry here isn’t high: it’s to entertain the possibility that we aren’t smarter or more insightful than Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Lao Tzu, the authors of the Upanishads, and so on. Even if we decide that we do have a better inside view on Reality than those mentioned above (not recommended, by the way), that wouldn’t be an intelligent move with any credibility until they had all been, at the very least, investigated exhaustively.
Of course, this leads us to “organized religion.”
There are plenty of hazards in organized religion, just as there are hazards in going Spiritual But Not Religious (also known as “Disorganized Religion.”)
It’s all “hazardous.”
But the core idea is simple: meaninglessness is incompatible with all major religions.
Taking this path seriously can lead to nihilism getting pushed to the margins, drying up, and withering away.
(4) Experiential, or “The Love Thing”
There’s an age-old, time-tested, all-natural, and effective solution for meaninglessness.
It’s also one of the most well-known that often hides in plain sight.
It’s simply this: Get married, have kids, raise a family.
It isn’t easy, especially today. But it can be the basis for a beautiful – and meaningful – life.
Love, in this sense, can “solve” the problem of meaning, because the love simply makes all the rest worthwhile. It makes something – someone – worth dying for.
It doesn’t require advanced philosophy, decades of prayer or meditation, or rare mystical experiences.
This approach also has all the ingredients of compelling drama. And lack of drama – the sense of being in a story that goes nowhere – is a key component of a lack of meaning.
Drama is defined by conflict and struggle. All good stories involve struggles, and the best stories involve the greatest struggles. (The best sports games also involve the greatest struggles. Lopsided victories are typically boring.) Family life is riddled with drama - passions, arguments, joys and tears, trials and triumphs, scenes of agony and ecstasy – all of which, taking place over years and decades, can transform us.
It can shape what might otherwise be a mere jumble of life experiences into a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and with a real-life “character arc.” And it can become a compelling, meaningful, entertaining story – one we not only watch passively, but to live out.
It can initiate a story engine involving a key struggle. Can we love someone else more than we love ourselves? Answering that isn’t a one-time event, but takes place daily. It also isn’t answered by words, but by actions.
Like the knight’s code of chivalry, it involves serving and protecting the weak and vulnerable with an ethos of selflessness. (After all, what’s more vulnerable than a child?) Even in small ways, it means rising to the role of the hero and heroine by freely offering one’s allegiance and service to a higher cause. That “cause” (or individual, or set of individuals) can transform an otherwise mundane reality into a mission.
Nihilism hasn’t been a widespread problem for most individuals throughout most of history because families and religion have been largely intact. Modernity has seen the disintegration of both of these, thrusting us into the existential no-man’s land, and has led to (soft) nihilism becoming popular and even widespread.
Like any other approach, there are no guarantees. Merely having a marriage and family in itself isn’t a cure-all. Some families become sources of misery and dysfunction. Success in these realms requires no small amount of knowledge and skill. (For example, psychological health and spiritual clarity are key ingredients to making relationships non-dysfunctional.)
But built into these is the means of becoming part of “something bigger than ourselves.” A family is “bigger” than the individual, by definition. And that “something isn’t a theoretical utopia, distant ambition, or abstract cause, but something both profound and intimate that can stare you right in the face.
(5) Meaninglessness Can Become Meaningless
There are ways meaninglessness itself can become meaninglessness.
Deconstruction can be deconstructed.
Meaninglessness can be “cured” when we see it as just not true – as a mistaken way of seeing the world or misperception of reality. It can be revealed as mirage, a kind of sinister magic trick, or a dead end. It can be like the classic Hindu story of the “terrifying, poisonous snake” that’s eventually revealed to be not a snake at all, but just a rope.
In this sense, meaninglessness can be "cured" by hard thinking.
Meaninglessness can arise as the result of a “deconstruction” of meaning. But deconstruction can deconstruct itself.
When we follow meaninglessness, deconstruction, or toxic skepticism to their logical conclusions, they implode. They destroy themselves.
And what’s left over after that collapse?
Only “meaning.”
The process can work in many ways. Here are a few.
a) The phrase “everything is meaningless” is a meaningful phrase.
In this way, the phrase “everything is meaningless” contradicts itself.
True lack of meaning doesn’t come to us in the form of coherent, intelligent, well-articulated ideas or logical arguments. (It comes to us as the opposite – noise, gibberish, and apparent chaos). Coherence, intelligence, well-articulated ideas, and logic point to an intelligent, ordered, meaningful universe.
If everything really were meaningless, then the phrase “everything is meaningless” would have no meaning. The phrase itself wouldn’t make sense.
But it does make sense. That means at least some things are meaningful.
And if some things are meaningful, others might be as well.
b) The word “meaningless” depends on a prior sense of meaning.
What does the word “meaningless” refer to?
It refers to a certain something that’s noticeably missing. That “something” is meaning.
Meaninglessness, then, depends on a prior sense of meaning. The word “meaninglessness” can only be defined in relation to what it lacks. There has to be something to compare it to.
We intuitively sense that a state of meaninglessness lacks something important.
What is that “sense”? And why does it seem like a critical component to human nature?
If we seek that “intuitive sense” out and make it fully conscious, we might discover that we have a native sense of meaning that we’re aware of before a subsequent sense of meaninglessness. It lives on a deeper level. It’s the problem’s grandfather. It was around before the problem even existed.
Like nostalgia for simpler times or memories of childhood that were more innocent – or, even further – a memory of a kind of Eden we’ve lost, as a kind of drama of “Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained” – we can intuitively realize how the problem of meaninglessness depends on a greater context – and couldn’t even exist unless a state of meaning was the deeper reality.
c) What’s the archaeology of meaninglessness?
Meaninglessness can often arise as a by-product of a certain worldview, life philosophy, or series of assumptions about the world.
In other words, if we adopt a certain life philosophy, a sense of meaninglessness might suddenly start making appearances a few steps later, seemingly out of nowhere.
For example, the worldview of materialism isn’t the same as nihilism. But it’s a slippery slope. To the extent that we think things through and follow things through to their logical conclusions, we can discover that materialism eventually leads to nihilism. (Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus explored those slopes pretty thoroughly.)
The basic slide works like this: materialism assumes that the whole of reality is physical, and only physical. And everything physical is impermanent. Therefore, the whole of reality is impermanent. And since everything is impermanent, everything is ultimately meaningless.
Arguments rage on about whether the above ideas hold up. But a basic question can help clarify things here.
Is materialism true?
How do we know?
These questions can stir up the hornet’s nest. They lead to some slippery ground in the realms of examining life philosophies or worldviews, and the yardsticks we use to measure those, all of which are discussed here.
But the central point here is that the materialistic worldview is grounded on a series of often-unexamined assumptions that are presumed, adopted, or embraced because they seem more pleasant than the alternatives.
Meaninglessness, in other words, can ultimately be seen as an article of faith.
But where does this “faith” often come from?
d) Meaninglessness often comes from overgeneralizing.
Some things in life make sense.
When we sit in a chair, we expect it to hold us. (And sometimes it does.) When we turn the key in a car, we expect it to start. When we press a button on the television remote, we expect it to turn on or off, and get frustrated when it doesn’t.
In these cases, life makes sense.
But of course, things don’t always go as expected. Chairs collapse.
Sometimes, things make no sense. Freak accidents, unpredictable deaths, seemingly bizarre, random events happen every day. And in those cases, life doesn’t make sense.
Those are typically exceptions.
But we sometimes extrapolate those exceptions to be the norm, the whole picture, and forget that they’re the exceptions and not the rule.
A sense of meaninglessness can arise by ignoring all the instances where life makes sense, and overgeneralizing strange exceptions to be “the full picture.” We can focus exclusively on the instances of bizarre accidents and ignore the rest. We can define the times when it doesn’t make sense as “real” and the cases when it does as “unreal.”
If someone dismisses everything meaningful, valuable, and reasonable, and only allows evidence that seems bizarre, random, and seemingly pointless, they put their thumb on the scale. It leads inevitably to a predetermined conclusion. (It’s a conclusion that only makes sense against a background of meaning (per point (b) above).
The problem of meaninglessness can arise from overgeneralizing.
Some problems arise from the way we describe the problem.
e) Meaninglessness arises from particular habits.
Many intelligent people today often adopt what they’d describe as a “scientific approach” to living, based on ideas that Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes helped mainstream.
Those ideas have to do with
1) doubt,
2) empiricism (or trusting experience instead of abstract reasoning or theory),
3) criticism, and
4) control
Doubt can be a valuable tool. A lack of healthy, robust skepticism risks making someone naïve and gullible. But doubt and skepticism can also turn toxic. Toxic doubt and skepticism can lead to doubting everything, all the time. Doubting everything (where the only certainty that can seem to survive is the somewhat useless idea that “I exist,” for example) doesn’t necessarily help us navigate the complexities of life. It can lead to continual hesitation, a lack of confidence, and paralyzing timidity. Doubt can be a useful servant but a terrible boss. We can sometimes benefit by doubting doubt itself.
Empiricism means trusting direct experience (instead of theory). It’s a valid approach, and is typically much better than, say, being carried away by fantasy, theory, and wild abstractions. But it also limits us. Our everyday experiences are often mundane. But when we adopt mundane empiricism as our sole and primary epistemology, our world suddenly becomes constricted, narrowed down to the ordinary. This maneuver frames all religion, spirituality, and anything seemingly “otherworldly” as theoretical, abstract, and impossibly distant. Our everyday experience often involves visceral experiences of pain, suffering, change, and death. Yet the things religion and spirituality speak of – “eternity,” “salvation,” “nirvana,” “peace beyond all understanding,” and so on – can seem light-years away from the realities of everyday life. But the disconnect here can stem from restricting oneself solely to pure empiricism. It shrinks our map of the world to one single person’s limited experience – a small amount of data in the grand scheme of things, like a tiny single dot on a huge painting. It also often rejects revelation as a possible source of truth (especially when revelation could be the empirical experience of another person, #2 above). And again: trusting one’s own empirical experience – and only that – only means assuming that one is smarter than Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Lao-Tzu, many philosophers. Theologians, and so on, and dismissing everything they say in favor of one single individual’s firsthand experience. In this sense, instead of a hard-nosed reality, it can be rooted in existential poverty. Restricting oneself to empiricism as the sole means of knowing reality unnecessarily limits us to a tiny selection of experiences. Like gambling, it can seem invigorating at first, but it can ultimately make it more likely to lead to bankruptcy.
Criticism, like doubt, can be a helpful tool. A healthy-minded “trust but verify” attitude can lead to hard-won street smarts. But – again, like doubt – it can also turn toxic. “Constructive criticism” leads to improvement. But non-constructive criticism is corrosive. It doesn’t create; it destroys. It tears down, but doesn’t build. It’s parasitic in that it always depends on something else to exist. (There must be something to criticize. There could be no movie critics without moviemakers.) Like doubt, criticism is also a helpful servant, but a terrible boss.
Control is often assumed to be inherently good. When we get control of immiserating conditions - disease and famine, for example – it’s obviously good. Along these lines, science and technology aim to give us control over nature, and are therefore obviously good. But there’s another side to this coin when it takes form in the real world. Who is in control? And those individuals who are in control – what do they do with that control? How are they controlling things, and to what end? What are the limits? Should we humans try to control everything in the universe? What if some of the more sinister characters of history had achieved that? If not, where is the borderline that clarifies where our efforts to control things end? One hidden presumption throughout much of this discussion – and often in science and technology – is that nature should always change, and we should never change. The assumption is that we should always mold reality to conform to us rather than us conforming to reality. If we’re overweight, the answer isn’t to eat less, eat better food, and exercise more; it’s to invent a pill (via technology) that makes fat disappear, seemingly magically. We don’t have to change ourselves; the world can do all the changing. This raises age-old questions of hubris, pride, the nature of reality, and the extent to which we should play God. Who really is in control – humans, nature, God, or something else? Our answers to questions like these are often assumed, rarely discussed, but worth discussing.
f) See how it depends on an array of questionable assumptions
Certain ideas create a sense of meaninglessness.
The ideas we adopt can be medicine or poison. Much depends on the individual.
The process of deconstruction is one example. It involves relentless criticism of essentially everything in sight, pointing out flaws and imperfections endlessly.
But it typically exempts itself from this process. It gives itself a free pass from the ordeals it imposes on others. But what if we revoke that pass, and apply the process of deconstruction to the process of deconstruction itself? With this, the results are often clear: relentless deconstruction typically reduces everything to rubble (leading ultimately to nihilism) and offers no positive solutions. If deconstruction eventually destroys even itself, it doesn’t seem like a train we should board.
The “apophatic” approach to meaninglessness involves conquering negativity by pushing it to its logical conclusions, then going beyond.
But deconstruction is only one idea that can lead to a sense of meaninglessness.
There are several others.
For example, a sense of meaningless often assumes that death is the end, that there is no God, that all major religions are wrong about everything, that our deepest intuitions about life are wholly mistaken, that the most influential human beings to have ever lived (Buddha, Moses, Abraham, Jesus, Lao-Tzu, etc) were wrong about their central ideas, and so on.
A hard-nosed scientist might say here, “Those assumptions are unwarranted, and evidence is lacking.”
(6) Get rid of addictions
To a heroin user, everything that isn’t heroin seems meaningless.
To a serious video game addict, everything that isn’t video games seems meaningless.
To a serious alcoholic, everything that doesn’t involve drinking seems meaningless.
These outlooks don’t reflect an objective, realistic perception of life as it really is.
Instead, it’s based on the psychology of the heroin user, the video game addict, the alcoholic. Plenty of people find life meaningful who don’t use heroin, play video games, or drink. Addiction means being in the grip of something. That grip can mean seeing life through a very specific lens, which can distort the view to a profound degree.
If we correct that grip, life can look very different.
(7) “Existential Fitness”
Overcoming a sense of meaninglessness can work like the body’s immune system. The stronger the immune system, the more illnesses and diseases are kept at bay.
This type of “immune system strength” could be described as “existential fitness” (as described here).
It takes a certain level of existential fitness to understand, let alone acknowledge, the problem of meaninglessness. Many aren’t even aware of the problem on a conscious level.
And once someone becomes aware of the problem, it takes an even greater level of existential fitness to overcome it.
But how is existential fitness measured?
As described here, one approach to measuring existential fitness could consider three factors: 1) alienation from oneself, 2) alienation from others, and 3) alienation from God or Reality.
And how do we overcome these forms of alienation?
There is no silver bullet or magic pill for problems like these. They require holistic, system-wide approaches. In a few words, it involves a way of life.
What is the “way of life”?
Broadly speaking, it means health of the body, heart, mind, and soul is central. It often involves asking Big Questions or tackling existential riddles, and seeking answers through a direct experience of sanity as nurtured by contemplative practice or inner experiments that coalesce into a kind of “inner work.” There are many ingredients involved, making it look more like a team effort, akin to a football team, with various players each playing a role. There are elements involving psychology, spirituality, relationships, lifestyles, life philosophies, and so on. It’s a concert with many things working together and in balance.
Becoming more existentially fit can clarify our vision and help us perceive meaning.
The above are seven potential routes to overcoming meaninglessness.
One route might be more effective than others, depending on the person.
No single route is a cure-all. Each has potential strengths and weaknesses.
Each route can complement the others.
It’s also possible to use all of the various approaches.
They can help us walk the edge of the double-edged swords, so to speak.
For example: #1 can launch a search. But there’s a risk of seeking endlessly and never finding, unless there’s a #2 revelation. But revelations, even when they happen (or don’t happen), can be disorienting and confusing. Testing, confirming, and validating those revelations can happen by checking them in the context of #3, secondhand revelations, or established major religions. Of course, #3 or “organized religion” on its own can sometimes veer off course, but direct revelations (#2) and everyday life (#4) can help keep it in check and grounded in reality. And throughout, clear thinking and rigorous analysis (#5) can help ensure it stays on course, coherent, and relatively consistent. And so on.
It's a multi-pronged attack against nihilism.
But it’s essential to keep the real target in mind.
The real trick isn’t merely to change the world, but to change yourself.
It can be easy to assume we’re perfect, and “the world” is the problem.
One way meaninglessness can be so insidious is that we often don’t see it as a problem.
When we’re in the midst of it, we think it’s “Reality.”
We can sometimes assume it’s just “the way things are.” We can think we’ve arrived at an objective truth, or an accurate description of the nature of the universe – that “life is ultimately pointless” and “the worldview or life philosophy of nihilism is essentially correct.” If we assume this, then the only problem becomes how to deal with (what we think is) that reality.
But is it true?
The question hinges on a critical point: what we see “out there” often depends on what’s “in here.”
To see the world clearly, we need to know ourselves.
That might sound like a hokey cliché. But to really "know thyself" is a pretty tricky business.
For example, we typically see a glass of water as…just a glass of water.
It’s just a regular, boring, plain glass of water.
But to someone thirsty, that otherwise boring glass of water can suddenly look delicious.
To a man crossing in a desert, it can become the most beautiful thing in the world. It can become the embodiment of life over death.
To a toddler, watching The Godfather would likely be meaningless or boring. To a grownup, it’s fascinating.
To most of us, a calculus textbook seems like gibberish. But to a math geek like Leibniz or Pascal, it’s better than an amusement park. It’s a secret glimpse into the mysteries of the universe.
If we see the world as meaningless, maybe we aren’t seeing the world as it is.
It might be the case that we’re looking at scattered pieces of a puzzle we haven’t solved yet. They pieces don’t form a single, overarching, coherent image.
If we suddenly fit the pieces together correctly, the world itself may not have changed at all. But we’ve suddenly made sense of it, so we see it differently.
And then we might see meaning that we had missed before.
An ordinary painting, song, or novel can suddenly come to life and take on a whole new meaning when we “get it.”
The painting, song, or novel didn’t change. The person seeing the painting, hearing the song, or reading the novel did.
To solve some problems, the world doesn’t necessarily need to change; we do.
Maybe something like this is what Traherne was talking about.
He described the “right” way to enjoy the world:
“You never enjoy the world aright,
till the sea itself floweth in your veins,
till you are clothed with the heavens
and crowned with the stars.”
The sea, flowing in our veins?
The heavens as our clothes?
Wearing the stars like a hat?
Maybe “seeing the world properly,” after all, doesn’t have to be an entirely unpleasant experience.
Maybe it could mean, as William Blake said, seeing “a World in a grain of sand...And Eternity in an hour.”
We often think nothing could be more boring or meaningless than a single grain of sand. And an hour is just about passing the time.
But if Blake and Traherne were on to something, then maybe even a grain of sand, or a single hour, are be meaningful beyond measure, if we can figure out how to see them properly.
Maybe some paths really do lead to poison ivy.
But not all. Some might lead to a joy that reaches beyond our wildest imagination. Maybe some people have even traveled that path, experienced that joy, and then tried to tell the rest of us.
And maybe, in the end, that means something.