Meaning of Life?

What is the meaning of life? That may be the quintessential human question. One with which each of us in our own way grapples.

What if we are actually asking the wrong question? What if the real question is ‘what does life ask of me?’

Viktor Frankl, most known for Man’s Search for Meaning, his deeply personal look at lessons learned through surviving the concentration camps of World War II, offers us this vantage point in another of his works, Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything.

Frankl proposes that life arises as fate or circumstance, over which we have no control. Life comes at us unannounced, moment by moment. We truly do not and cannot know what will arise in any given instant.

Doesn’t that seem like the Biblical manna from heaven? That life itself is manna? That it comes to feed us through experience, and perhaps, through possibilities?

It is clear to me as I write, that much of life does not arrive garbed as manna. Sometimes it comes as beauty and fulfillment and wonder, though just as likely life comes as challenge and failing and apparent ugliness.

A secret that Frankl brings, that is true to my experience, has to do with how we engage what comes to us garbed as life. He goes so far as to say our engagement is ennobling, that means we are being human as we experience our lives.

What if life’s meaning is found through living, through experience, through engaging?

One of my longest serving mentors, Master Samwise, said he desired more than anything else to be free to experience what is. To which I would add … exactly as it is, and exactly as it is not, and certainly not as the fantasy we seem to create in order to avoid the experience as it is.

If this is true, the only answer we need is our response to what life brings us. Apparently, gracefulness is optional. Yet in the best of all worlds, awareness of an experience as it arises along with our fully conscious choice to engage life on the terms life is offering are our secret human superpower.

A word for the wise is useful. Living with awareness and consciousness can be an exhausting endeavor. Remember, life is a non-stop emergence, a full-time creation. Of course, even being willingly exhausted by life is meaningful, and perhaps a choice to be made by each of us in our own way.