Have You Written Your Life User Manual Yet?
On the search for meaning in life
The floor is made of intercalating black and white tiles and the temptation to not step on the white ones is too big. Even as grown-ups we can make games out of daily components of our lives — or keep playing the ones we have since we were kids. And what is a game but a set of rules with a purpose? Step on the white one, game over.
Our ability to make sense of things, be it for work, or be it for sheer playfulness, is immense. As we play an instrument, our ears know right away if the next key we play fits in or sounds weird.
Life is rich; it offers us the possibility of intrinsic and extrinsic meaning. These can be separated or combined depending solely on our individual perspective.
Dancing, listening to music, humor, the pleasure of togetherness can all be an end in themselves, for they are joyful. By intrinsic here I mean anything that is not an instrument to accomplish something else.
I could use my dance to impress the cute guy across the dance floor, to burn calories and/or to win a dance competition — all extrinsic. I can do my analytical work to make money and pay the bills (extrinsic), to solve a social problem that needs analytical support (extrinsic), or/and because I actually enjoy solving puzzles (intrinsic). All meanings can co-exist.
Note that the extrinsic meaning of something can be created by me or created by the outside world. Let’s say I am hungry and eat my greens. Sure I need nourishment, but society keeps telling me to eat my greens because it is good for me. Maybe I don’t even enjoy them as I eat them while looking at my phone. Maybe I didn’t consciously choose to eat greens from within, as much as because “I know I should”.
I am not saying everything needs to be joyful and fun. I am still to find out how putting out the trash could possibly be fun. No.
It’s about alignment.
Every extrinsic meaning created by myself (without bullshit) is potentially fulfilling.
However, beware of meaning created by someone else. If I don’t fully believe in something, by default it does not resonate with my heart and, sooner or later, it will crack. Every “should”, “have to”, “must” has a trace of conditioning derived from a belief system.
We accept social conventions with our minds, but the final judge is our hearts.
What does not come from our hearts, sooner or later gets us frustrated. We can try to deceive ourselves as much as we want, but if the point is not given in full honesty with our hearts, they won’t satisfy us. It’s like when we are just playing along. They will be a weight on our shoulders, a tick-box to be checked, an energy drain, a joy killer.
So… what’s the point of your life?
Crazy as it is, in a world where everything has a point, even if “just for pleasure”, we keep asking “what is the point of life?”.
“Life is pointless” is the whole base of existential philosophy.
In a society full of external expectations and demands, no wonder we feel deprived of real meaning.
When we create our own businesses we spend days, if not weeks, discussing what is our mission and vision. Any new client we get requires a good planning phase. In romantic relationships, we talk about what we expect from each other, what is a good relationship for us, and every time we have an issue we discuss it so we can improve the relationship.
Not doing the same with “what is the point of my life?” and expecting to have a ready-made and satisfying answer is sort of comical.
Our life is our biggest project; it requires as many check-ins and status meetings as any other of our projects.
Why do we expect that ready-made answer from life, when we don’t have any issues attributing meaning to all small facets of our daily lives ourselves? We have no issue with listening to music only for pleasure, to eat tasty food to nourish our bodies and to work to pay for that food.
As long as we expect the external world to give us meaning, we will be frustrated. And, if we say life is pointless, then surely that is what we get, for that is what we have provided to ourselves.
Life is not pointless. Life is full of points.
Can the point of life be to have as much joy as possible? Absolutely. Life is immensely pleasurable. The difficulty for some to relay to that shows how we have accepted living a life deprived of pleasure, or where pleasure is restricted to certain parts of life. How we got disembodied of the pleasure of being present and of our senses and allowed our mind to run the show. If life is not impregnated with joy, it is possible to rescue that part of ourselves we have left behind. Relearn to play. Slow down and rebuild the bridge to the heart.
Life is joyful, but not only. For anything can have multiple meanings.
Playing guitar is fun, but I also enjoy improving my skills, so I can create better songs and better express myself — and have fun while playing my new songs. All of these require some work. To harvest our fruits, we have to sow. Sure, I can make learning into a joyful activity, but nothing is a constant. For more joyful that I can make playing 20 times in a row the same A minor scale, I am not sure it will ever be as fun as playing one of my favorite songs.
We are perfect as we are, and we need to grow.
Both are true. Playing with the joy that is always available to us is great, but is not all. In what direction would you like to grow?
To sow one is to commit to nurturing the seeds, so they can grow. Commit to the work. Life becomes pointless when we are too afraid of committing. By being too scared of closing doors, of taking chances, we end up not opening doors at all.
Life is pointless when we are scared of the responsibility of having a point.
Even if the point we live by is to love, and fun and joyWe get to choose the values we want to live by, the energy and mood we bring to our everyday lives, how we want to build our days, what we want to learn and who we want to be, the people we spend time with, what we put our energy on. Most importantly, we get to choose when we review and update these decisions. We get to rethink our life contract as often as we want. It’s our individual project, for heaven’s sake.
Life is a journey we create ourselves. Like the tiles on the floor, we choose where to step. Every unconscious and unintentional step smells pointless. Good thing we get to choose when we want to stop playing. There’s no waiting for someone else to make the rules of our journey for us. It is because we have accepted the rules of someone else, such as our parents and society, that we get frustrated and feel sad with life’s pointlessness. That only creates frustration.
Who needs more “must’s”, “have to’s” and “should’s”?
The absurdity of life is only painful for those who have grown used to leaving the sheer pleasure of being behind, or are too scared of the responsibility of having a point. The part of us that is scared is the mind that is not connected to the heart. The mind forgets who we are by giving in to too much white noise from the outside. Like the lion who grew up amidst sheep believing to be one of them.
It’s about time the question “what is the point?” gets rewritten to “what are the points?” for surely we all have a few different ones, and the potential to an incredibly rich life.
What are the points of your life? Not sure? Don’t worry, take your time. Book “life check-in” time. Close your eyes, be silly, play, recover that innocence from within.
What are the things that really matter?
What do these things require of you?
And if later on what you came up with no longer feels right, sit again and update it. Go one layer deeper.
The only thing that matters is that whatever points you choose, they are chosen by you. Compromising here means giving your life away.
Hi, I am Aline Ra M, spiritual guide, energy worker, and tea lover.