Finding Meaning+
Published on September 16, 2004
By
PZach
In
Misc
FINDING MEANING
In my time of reflections this morning, I was reading the story, “One Little Candle”, in Rachel Remen’s ‘My Grandfather’s Blessings’. It is the story of a nursing administrator for whom “This work is holy. It is my calling.” But, “Only my patients know. I am afraid that people will laugh.” So she keeps the meaning she finds in her work to herself. But one day she hesitantly put up a candle and lit it in the course of a retreat session where people set up objects symbolic of their work. Another psychiatrist in the group too had brought a candle because “it represented her dream of being a professional and working with an open heart”. But she had left it unlit. She now lit it from the nurse’s candle. The nurse was moved to tears. She said, “When you lit your candle from mine, I saw why it might be important to stop hiding. Perhaps I can find the courage to be who I really am. Perhaps there are others…like you…..who are hiding, too.” That is the thought behind my starting this blog.
Let me share my reflections on this story. This nurse was authentic in her relations with her patients, but was unable to be that kind of person in her other dealings. But for many people, is there any part of life where there is real authenticity? Where can they reach for it?
Home is one place available to most people. But often family members do a great deal for one another without getting to mean much to one another. Couples usually begin by meaning a lot to each other. At this point, it is the relationship that is important to them and not what they actually do for each other. But as they come to live together, they get to do a lot, for each other and, later, for the family. So much so that eventually what they do for each other becomes what they mean to each other. The meaning of the relationship itself becomes weak. And the authenticity of the relationship is the poorer for it. If that happens in the most important relationship in life, that becomes the pattern for the rest of their life outside the family.
Couples, as they grow into a family, need to work at keeping the meaning of their relationship as their primary concern. And then extending that to the children as they arrive. When a child arrives, it is completely dependent on the parents biologically and socially. Yet their meaning to each other is a pure attachment which transcends the practical dependency. The challenge is to keep that meaning and to enable the child also to grow up practising an authenticity, an experience of being, which is more than the doing.
I have implied that relationship is a source of meaning, authenticity. But can there be meaning apart from relationships? An artist transfers his “meaning” into whatever he is making. Perhaps aesthetics is a way of life which introduces meaning into things, into actions. In that case, the challenge is to bring aesthetics back into our relationships.
I hope to hear, through this blog, the experience of others in finding, and keeping, meaning in life. Also other similar reflections of their own which they may care to share.