You know, that feeling you get when you look around at your life and wonder why, if everything is fine, you still feel a little lost.
Within a split second, the guilt sets in and the gremlin takes over, chastising: “Fine? You’ve got it great. You have food, a nice home, transportation, friends, family – you’ve got it all. What on earth do you have to complain about?”
Applauding yourself for restraint, you avoid the temptation to adopt your best 14-year-old attitude and whine, “I’m NOT complaining!”
The longing for more is effectively silenced, the conversation closed…for now.
Does this feel familiar? Do you hear this “conversation” –or some variation- rise and fall in your head as you go through your week? Maybe not every day, but enough to have a pattern for dealing with it, a script that settles things…for the moment.
When this happens, though your gremlin refuses to admit it, you are actually wrestling with one of the existential questions of life – the search for meaning.
A good life is not the same thing as a meaningful life. And the search for a meaningful life does not necessarily lead to a dramatically changed life.
Sometimes we seek meaning by finding something new, adding to our lives, or creating change. Other times, when we pay attention, we find meaning in the life we already have.
Either way, allowing ourselves to search for meaning makes the greatest difference.
Emphasizing meaning in life is a radical notion. We spend much of our time creating lives that are expected of us. We fulfill obligations and tether ourselves to increasing responsibilities. Somewhere along the path, many of us have lost touch with what we want for ourselves.
Wouldn’t it be amazing if standard cocktail party conversation shifted from, “What do you do”? to, “What do you want most in life?” Imagine how much more interesting the conversations would be?
Here’s the thing: to want deeply for ourselves has become a outrageous act. We are taught to want materially – and our culture reinforces that with every waking breath. But what is missing for many of us – men and women for different reasons – is the belief that we are entitled to the pursuit of meaning and happiness.
Our forefathers knew this and wove it into the creation of our country. And they were not talking about iPads and home theaters but about the substantive things that bring purpose into our lives.
I frequently work with my coaching clients about learning to let themselves want. It’s been trained out of us, really. That four-year-old knew how to want, but somewhere along the road we were taught to fulfill expectations rather than pursue our dreams. So many of us don’t know what we want anymore, much less how to go about creating it.
For men, this often means that the need to “provide” has superseded a deep-seeded desire to do work that is fulfilling. I am thinking of one client who would have been a spectacular artist, but the need to get a ‘real’ career diverted his path.
For women, this often means that we put everyone else’s needs ahead of our own, and we barely make it to the bottom of our own lists. I cannot count the number of clients whose ‘responsibilities’ have driven them to give themselves away. Personally, I embodied this role for many years, and still struggle with it on a daily basis.
For all of us, what we lack is a genuine sense of entitlement to live fully.
The funny thing is that most of us want that for those we love – our children, our parents, our friends, and sometimes even our spouses. We believe that people should be able to be happy and fulfilled. And yet at times it feels impossible to apply that belief to ourselves!
There are no easy answers to finding meaning, for sure. But there are three tricks that could certainly help:
This blog also appears as part of my regular column on ShareWiK.com.