Notes from an Open Life

The Journey - revisited

Life is full of changes. Today is Sunday, August 7, 2011, and I was just remembering a draft blog entry I wrote almost two years ago now.

I'll let my two-year-ago self riff on this first, and then add a bit:

So at a quarter to two this afternoon, October 20, 2009, this huge thing dropped into my head - or maybe my being. It was one of those moments where everything comes together. It's like a framework falls into your life and suddenly helps you make sense of so many things.

And today it was the image/icon of the journey.

My life has been about journeys. I love road trips. My good friend Greg and I took an iconic road trip across the US in 1988. When I was in high school and in my early 20s, I would often go on long trips in the car, often by myself.

But the journey is more than just travelling. For me, it's a way of being in the world. I love to start new ventures, to try something I haven't tried before, to journey in and be the student, the learner. I get bored with what seems to me to be the same old thing.

There are so many ways the journey echos through every stage of my life. Moving when I was young, exploring, even my dreams echo this. A common dream theme for me is going someplace. Usually I don't even get to the place I'm trying to go in the dream - I just am on the way there.

And that's as far as I got back then.

So the image/concept of the journey is back in my head and my life again. What I would add to this entry is that, for me, the journey is not necessarily about the destination. It's about the trip. I often times enjoy myself so much just getting to where I think I'm going. It makes me smile just to think about this.

Another thing that popped into my head recently is a quote that really resonated with my father (who has since passed away). It's from James Thurber, which surprised me, as Thurber is one of my favorite authors, and this quote surprised me.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

Apparently this is written on a wall somewhere in Cambria, California, which is where my dad saw it. I always used to think the quote was kind of trite, and to some extent obvious. Yet it seems to resonate with me now, or at least more so, and I think it's worth another look.

I don't know that I have anything else to add at this point, except that I think I'm on some kind of psychic/spiritual journey right now. My life has changed so much in some ways since October 2009. I've completed my Masters in Counseling degree. I've experienced success through my business. I've grown in ways I really never could have foreseen. I've opened myself up to the world and found it a truly wonderful place. It's truly amazing. And this journey, obviously, isn't over yet.

The journey is wonderful and amazing and terrifying all at the same time. In its entirety, the journey is beautiful. It can be no other way. Because our journey is ours, and ours alone. Don't get me wrong - everyone in our lives is part of our journey. That's why they are there. But the beauty we create for ourselves is what makes the journey worthwhile. Worth every minute of it. I'm really glad to be here. I hope you are too.

Meaninglessness: an introduction

Sometimes I find it easy to slip into the gentle swirl of meaninglessness. At this writing, I’m sitting at a Chipotle Mexican grill restaurant in the center of Colorado. I like Chipotle a lot – their food is good, and, according to their advertising and menus, they seem to be trying to be environmentally responsible (though they still admittedly kill chickens, cows and pigs).

So I eat here probably two or three times a month. But occasionally, in the middle of my meal, I’ll find myself slipping into an existential question - why am I eating? I mean, beyond the immediate biological needs – I’m hungry – or the possible psychological needs – I need to comfort myself, and this food comforts me. What is the purpose behind my eating?

To cut to the chase, why is it important for me to be alive and continue eating? What am I contributing to the world? Why am I here? What is my purpose?

And so, from a simple meal stop, I’m pretty quickly rotating around this whirlpool of existentialism. What’s my purpose? What are the other customers’ purposes? What about the employees?

It’s easy to get distracted by our day-to-day activities. The employees are here, well, because someone needs to make my burrito when I come in, and clean up the table after I’ve had my little existential crisis. In many respects, that’s pretty reasonable and satisfying. Our jobs give us a sense of purpose, at least for a little while.

But I think we all fall into this whirlpool occasionally – when the job, our activities, sometimes even our relationships and beliefs seem to pale and lose meaning. Sometimes it’s just a quiet moment in time, and we quickly re-embrace our world of meaning. Sometimes something disrupts our lives: a death, a traumatic experience. Something can happen that suddenly shifts our understanding of the world, and the world doesn’t make sense to us any longer. We can’t fit what happens into our old view of the world.

I believe that we’re getting to the point where we have so much information coming into our senses – information overload, or perhaps, information overexposure. I believe we increasingly experience these existential crises, though we might not be aware that we’re having them. Typically these are mini-crises, things that we might not even think of as crises - a piece of news, witnessing something disturbing. I think that each of our worlds, and our meaning of the world, is disrupted so often that it’s increasingly difficult to continue to make sense of the world.

When we reach a point where our meaning has become skewed and tattered, we look for something, anything, outside of us to help us make sense of it.

But our construct of the world cannot necessarily be mended by the same source of the destruction of our world. In other words, we cannot entirely rely on the world to create meaning for us, when that world was the initial source of our loss of meaning.

Which leaves us – where? For many of us, it leaves us confused, empty, deeply hurt, angry, scared and resentful. It leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed and raw - at wit's end. The world makes less and less sense. And it’s increasingly difficult to look for and find meaning.

Yet this is where our core thirst lies. We so desperately WANT the world to make sense. But – if you’re like me – there does not seem to be a single unifying perspective out there that will make sense of it all. Or at least, that will make satisfying sense. To me, satisfying sense and meaning incorporates all parts of us – our thoughts, our emotions, our spirituality, our bodily sense. Parts of the world make sense – but what is the deeper connection? The deeper meaning?

I think some religions attempt to provide the meaning – but it’s the satisfying sense that is often lacking for me. (I’m not quite sure how deeply to dive into religion here – I suspect that we will need to – but I’m not going to take that dive just yet.)

At some point, during this line of thinking, I arrive at a state where my meaning starts to erode more radically – as if the blinders are falling off - and I think, “What IS all this? What exactly is going on here?”

Which is the perfect place to be as we delve into this more deeply. I realize I'm talking in absolutes here - talking about a "single unifying perspective", something that will tie every loose end together and provide all the answers. While this is something I think we truly yearn for, I am becoming more and more convinced that the solution - or at least the solution for most - will be less than comprehensive, and, to be honest, that's going to be quite fine. As we dive in, I hope to ease you into the whirlpool with me – and then I hope, too, that we can begin to navigate this river, or ocean, or wherever it is we decide we are, together.

Moving into meaninglessness

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.