For several months now, I've had the idea for a book floating around in my head. Working title: "Meaninglessness, and what you can do about it."
Why meaninglessness? Because I think a lot of people - myself included - struggle with making meaning of their lives, or some part of their lives.
I believe that we make meaning by making sense of all of what is in our world - physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. If we can make these realms make sense together, then we have meaning in our lives. If we don't - or can't - make sense of these, then we feel some conflict or dissonance in our relation to ourselves and the world.
Here's the thing - this meaning-making process goes on for us whether we consciously do it or not. I think there is something naturally within us that needs to have the world make sense. And if the the conscious part of us is not working on this process, the unconscious part definitely is.
What can happen is that the unconscious part can make some pretty strange sense of the world - but we don't have the chance, really, to review how the unconscious has made sense of the world before it becomes a part of our way of being. It just happens.
Let me give you an example.
In doing some of my own therapy work a few years ago, I was working with a wonderful therapist who was helping me explore my past. She suggested that something significant had happened to me when I was two or three years old.
Now, I literally remember almost nothing about being two or three years old. But she asked me, "What would you have been doing? What would your life have been like at that time?"
And a vision came to my mind of me standing in the kitchen with my mother. I was waiting for her to get me something. As I talked about this scene with the therapist, and started to piece together what I actually knew about my mother and my family at that time, I realized that the strong FEELING associated with all of that was one of anxiety and worry. Which made sense: circumstances as I know them at that time were VERY anxious and tenuous.
Now, before we go any further - the question in my mind was, "Am I reconstructing a memory that didn't happen?" We've all heard the issues with false memories. I asked myself that, and continue to ask myself that. And what I realize is that the FEELING of that time is really the memory - a memory that has stuck with me. The scene itself doesn't really matter.
The WORDS associated with that feeling run along the lines of: "The world is not a safe place. The world is going to fall apart. And I need to do something about it."
As an adult, I can connect back with that feeling as a kid. And, as an adult, I can PUT WORDS to that feeling. Which helps me understand the message I was getting.
Here's the kicker: The feeling impressed upon me a vision of the world and a vision of myself in that world - without using words at all.
When I was only two or three years old, I was constructing meaning about myself and about the world - and I was still carrying that meaning 35 or 40 years later.
I think I've written about this before, but this concept still floors me - mainly because I was completely unaware that this was a driving factor of my life for years and years. This was an unquestioned belief running in me, without me entirely knowing it.
So this is what I'm talking about - how we make meaning for ourselves in conscious and, more importantly, unconscious ways. When our meaning structures conflict, or conflict with what we see in the world...well, it gets pretty interesting. In some ways, the sheer amount of information that comes at us every day contributes to our struggle with meaning, as we try to integrate it all. These are the topics I would like to explore in this and future posts.
I think the writing of this will be a meaning-making exercise in itself - helping me clarify my approach as I go along.
Interested? Have a similar experience? Well, come along, then, and let's see how we make meaning.
I think you should write a book.
Posted by: Brenda Bomgardner | December 05, 2010 at 05:51 PM