Posted on 25 Apr, 2008 -
What has your life added to this world?
Want to know what would really give meaning to your life?
Read on to discover!
Even my three year-old daughter knows what ‘to die’ means.
“It means,” she told me the other day, “that you’re not here any more.”
Yet her mother, fast approaching her fifth decade, still spends hours agonizing over what it really means ‘to live’.
And I know I’m not alone.
Don’t most of us go through periods of our life when we lament that our life has no meaning? Don’t we all hope to get to the end of our life and feel that our life has made a difference? That we have somehow mattered?
And then there is the eternal question of what is the meaning of life anyway?
Here are the real questions that could help you find the answers
I was having a bit of a mini crisis over such questions the other day when I very fortunately stumbled on a couple of answers that lead to a few days of brightness, enlightenment, positive happy energy and a lucky escape from the edge of not exactly a nervous breakdown (that came later in the week after the two week school holiday...) but some steps into the dark side.
What I suddenly found myself turning around and saying to my navel-gazing self was this:
“So what would it look like for your life to have more meaning?” “What would you need to do to make your life feel more meaningful?”
And… “What would it look like for the world to have more meaning for you?”
Thinking of answers to these questions alone was extremely powerful and energising for me - and I would very much recommend that you put them to yourself. It also lead me to some further reading and thinking that have been very galvanizing.
You don’t get meaning - you create it
In Timothy Dobbins book, Stepping Up, for example, I was struck by the idea that we should aim to add meaning to our job, rather than expecting our job to give us meaning.
“In the average day,” says this priest and business coach, “we may have a dozen different chances to make a difference. On the rush-hour drive to work we can allow someone to merge into our lane or we can force her to wait. On our way to the office we can ignore the man in the company cafeteria from whom we buy a cup of coffee or we can step up and smile and wish him a good day.”
Throughout every day there are literally hundreds of moments where we have different options about how we can act. And we could all do with being a little more aware of how we can make a difference to this world by choosing the better (and often braver) options.
Small increments of positive exchange
Because isn’t that, after all, what it is all really about?:
Making this a better world? Both for ourselves today and for future generations?
Each of us doing our own little bits to make things better instead of worse? More functional than dysfunctional? More happy instead of sad? More beautiful… More fair. More healthy. More wonderful…
And it all, in fact, comes down to love.
Not the ‘ooh, she’s got lovely legs, I wonder if she’ll dance with me’ kind of love.
But rather the love that is the opposite to fear. The outlook towards life and others that makes you feel good instead of bad. The attitude towards the world that makes you want to nourish it, not abuse it.
Fear can stop us from doing so many great things - whether it’s fear of others, fear of life, fear of change, fear of failure or just fear of acting or of being you.
Love can allow us to realise that there is nothing to fear accept missing the chance to live.
So get out there today and make a difference!
