Why make meaning?

In my last Articlish post, The true face of compassion? I wrote:

It occurred to me that I appear to be cobbling (and cross-examining) my own "cosmogony" or "metaphysics" or something, so to speak, to craft my understanding of why I exist.

As a dear friend shared about my writing, "You're not telling other people how to make meaning. Instead, what you're doing is saying, 'This is how I make meaning.'" Which is so true. ❤️

I got to thinking, "Why make meaning for myself?"

(Yes, I hang out with whys a lot. They're a chatty bunch. Highly recommend picking their brains.)

There are two questions there:

• Why make meaning?
• Why make meaning for myself?

Why make meaning?

I could fill this section with quotations from well-established research on the human need to make meaning, but that won't answer my question for me. I'm asking myself, and no one else.

Perhaps I should ask, "Why do I need or want to make meaning?"

Memory is an unreliable narrator. It is easy to mythologize events in one's distant past and assign significance to events where there was none.

However, my suspicion is that this is a drive I feel particularly keenly as someone who has been painfully aware of being extremely different since early childhood.

Even today, in my 40s, there is the constant reminder every day that the ways in which I see and sense, think and feel, stand out as flabbergasting and confounding to people around me.

This is not a difference imagined in my mind; it is a difference that is constantly being pointed out by others, directly or indirectly, though mostly unintentionally.

It is easy to become lost in an alien world. It is painful to exist as an obvious alien. Such legitimate sufferings, I think, lend themselves to existential meaning finding.

• Why do I exist?
• Why should I continue existing?
• And how?

Which leads me to my next question: Why make meaning for myself?

• Why don't I simply turn to long-established traditions, eastern, western or both, for the "answers" to my above three questions? Why reinvent the wheel, so to speak?
• Am I so arrogant to think that these universally human questions haven't already been asked, tackled, and even answered, by other humans who have lived, walked this earth and died before me?

Meaning is in context of and in relation to, and for me, meaning had to be sought in context and in relation to being different in a world that denies and abhors difference, and projects that intolerance everywhere, in everything. From thousands of years ago until today.

One could almost argue it's human nature to fear difference. In that case, what makes me human? Do I even want to be human any more? What does it mean to be human?

How am I supposed to find meaning in a world that tells people like myself, day in and day out, directly and indirectly, "Stop existing."

"Stop discomfiting the rest of us, to whom you do not belong. Stop reminding us of your existence, for you inconvenience our peace of mind and way of life."

"The problem is you. You are different. Solve your own problem. Stop being different."

"Be like us."

Sometimes, the whole world sounds like a cult.

So, yes, making meaning for oneself does not mean—nor require—the rejection of existing knowledge or wisdom.

However, I ask, how does one such as myself make meaning in context to and in relation with a world through its millennia of traditions of othering and dehumanizing the other?

• It's definitely not going to happen through wholesale swallowing of existing doctrines.
• Yet it's also not going to happen through wholesale rejection of existing doctrines, either.

I have to construct my own path. I have to construct my own stories.

• I have to ask: What kind of person do I want to be?
• I have to study existing doctrines, and think for myself: What resonates for me here, and what does not?

I've been accused in the past of cherry-picking, as an eclectic and syncretic explorer and thinker.

However, the fact is: We are all cherry-picking. Even the most fundamentalist of us are; for all doctrines contradict themselves. Interpretations are always inconsistent because doctrines are written by multiple people, in different ages with different value systems, during different socio-environmental pressures, and with languages that evolve.

That's how we end up with denominations, sects, intra-religious conflict etc.

The only difference here, with me, is I'm not expecting anyone else to agree with me, much less follow my ideas, stories and world view.

I see an imperfect metaphor of a ship.

I'm no ship builder, but I assume that ships are built according to the conditions they are expected to sail in (as well as the cargo they are expected to carry, but that matters less in this metaphor).

The ship that is I was not built with the appropriate equipment to understand, nor really navigate well through, the conditions it ended up existing in.

If I do not understand the conditions, and I likely never will, then, one asks, "Why sail at all?"

Why live? Why exist?

Why make meaning for myself?

• Because I need a mythology that helps me explain why I exist, why I should continue existing, and how I would like to continue existing—and contributing—in a dissonant world, in ways that make sense to me.
• Because the mythologies of others have rung empty to my soul over the years, and all the paths born from those mythologies—that I've fought to walk for decades—have broken my body and scarred my heart.

To be able to steer my own ship, which was built for me, with my own inner compass that I build for myself, even if that ship and compass don't fit well with the world at large.

• If meaning is just the story that we tell ourselves, why not make it a story that (finally) makes sense to my body, heart, mind and spirit, and that I enjoy?
• Why not tell a story that imbues every step I take for the rest of my life, however small and invisible, with this meaning and joy?

As Ursula Le Guin writes about Aneirin in her book Dancing at the Edge of the World:

But I am not sure whether he means by this that he must tell the story because he alone survived; or that he survived because he had the story to tell.