Let the Meaning of Your Life Be Your Guide

What to do on encountering one of life’s transitions - those times when your colliding worlds require you to make some serious, potentially life-changing choices.

Our culture encourages us to devote our lives to being conventionally successful. To have, for expample:

• A status job,

• Luxury house,

• Smart car/s,

• Fit body

• Designer clothes,

• Restaurant lifestyle.

all designed to show that we’re successful and have made it.

This lifestyle can give us pleasure, fun, excitement, happiness, delight, contentment, etc., but also fear, loneliness, stress, anxiety, depression, boredom, sadness, scarcity, and a sense of lack as we compete with each other to be seen to have made it.

Each of these states requires its opposite to exist, so that when we are happy, we know we shall become sad. So much as we can, we plan our lives to prolong positive states, but we eventually experience that whatever state may come will always go.

Not only do they come and go, but between them, they are all that we ever achieve. After a decade or two of this relentless cycle, we can be driven to ask: “Is this all that life’s about?”

Something’s missing

Striving to be conventionally successful, although encouraged and promoted by Western and increasingly Eastern cultures, is nothing but modern-day survival thinking. It evolved aeons ago when a big cave, thick furs, a physically strong body, trapping good food, and an important role within the tribe would have us survive. Survival was success.

The only states of being available to survival thinking, modern or not, are those opposing states of happiness/sadness, or excitement/boredom etc. What is never available are continuous states of bliss, joy, fulfilment, and inner peace, yet we know they exist.

So the answer to the question “Is this all that life’s about?” is “No!”

Yet we can have so much invested in our current lifestyle that we resist pushing for real answers to the question of why we are here and what life is really about.

That is, until we encounter one of life’s transitions or choice points. Those times when:

• Transitioning from full-time education to a career

• Changing your job or career

• Retiring after completing your life’s work

• Divorcing

• Losing someone close to you

• Being made redundant

• Experiencing an accident or serious illness

• Bankruptcy

• Loss of family

• Loss of family home

• And often, a combination of the above.

which force us to confront what life is about. At these choice points, we need wise guidance and are prepared to confront “What is the meaning of my life?”

A more exhaustive response to this question is necessary because transition points cause us to make longer-term life choices that can yield either a future of joy and fulfilment or a life of further dysfunction.

We look back, turn over our experiences, and try to work something out. But, typically, logic and rational thinking fail to come up with a conclusive answer. Asking friends and family for their thoughts can give ideas, but their advice is generally limited to what has worked for them. But they are not you.

If logic and working it out cannot provide us with adequate direction, by what yardstick may we move forward with our lives? Fortunately, our intuition can guide us, but only when we step beyond our minds’ survival programming.

What’s missing in lives devoted to success

Aristotle and American philosopher Charles Buechner point the way to lives of joy, fulfilment, and inner peace, if not bliss.

When planning our lives, Aristotle said,

• “Where our talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies our vocation.”

He was saying that when we use our gifts and talents in service to the world, we are fulfilling our calling. You could say, do what you’re good at and get paid for it, but it’s more than that. Aristotle deliberately employed the word ‘vocation’, which is more about pursuing one’s calling than about survival or success.

Frederick Buechner emphasised this more strongly:

• “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

This is similar to Aristotle’s but emphasises joy, or ‘the place God calls you to’. He means your joy, as well as others’.

What they both point to is that when you utilise your gifts and talents in the service of yourself and others, you experience joy in doing what you love doing, fulfilment in doing it for yourself and others, and inner peace from living your life authentically, in service to your higher Self.

And when you don’t, you don’t.

Everything has a purpose

If you look around you, right now, wherever you are, everything that you can see has a purpose. In fact, everything in the universe has a purpose.

As his book, ‘The Meaning of Life’, by James Hollis, states, “Nature never wastes energy”. And being part of nature, you too have a purpose which always serves both you and the greater good. The paradox is, you get to choose it.

You come also, with gifts and talents factory-fitted to pursue your purpose. Your gifts and talents are the things you do well and love doing, even when not being paid for doing them.

Living a life of meaning brings you joy, fulfilment, and inner peace

When you stop planning your life to serve yourself, and identify your purpose - that which you are called to do for the greater good - and employ your gifts and talents in pursuit of that, you will transcend your mind’s survival thinking and experience joy, fulfilment, and inner peace, ongoingly.

This is the challenge of life’s tumultuous transitions and choice points: they require you to re-evaluate your life and identify who you came here to be and what you came here to do.

Christopher Jones-Warner

Further resources:

• A Life of Meaning - James Hollis

• Bringers of the Light - Neale Donald Walsch

• ReCreating Your Self - Neale Donald Walsch

• The Purpose Programme - cjoneswarner.com