Manufacturing Meaning

A mid-life crisis is the right sort of description.

I'm leaving whatever stretched-out smouldering hunks remain of my first-half-of-life where they lay, and ignoring that smoke lingers, and burns scar. I am putting new clothes on my fat old bones and embracing radical displacement from this bath I drew for myself. We cannot outrun our past, but I'm literally putting as much distance between us as I can. The other side of the world. I'm neither excited, nor afraid. A sense of grief fits me like snake skin.

Why grief? What loss? It's not, as I once thought it was, grief for a series of personal failures and the many losses contained therein. It's not the lost potential, the missed opportunities or the thoughts of what could have been. It is grief for faith in my capacity for genuine meaning. Scatter the ashes.

The five stages of grief have evolved to six. Along with Anger and Bargaining and Acceptance now lives another essential hurdle in overcoming the emotional complexity of loss: Meaning. If the menu of events at your local Holiday Inn's annual therapist conference missed this topic, I would be surprised. I like the sheer hubris of it. In one swoop it identifies the indispensable quality of meaning to a life worth living, while also inviting us to invent it; like a new identity at a bar with too little novelty for our sense of mischief.

I have felt meaning, like love, and reached for it with whole abandon, again and again, each time knocked loose in some similar sort of humiliation. So onward this pickled night, I'm a spinster with trust issues on my reasons for being. If I grieve properly, maybe I can get beyond it, like the monks who learn to stop breathing.  

The notion of manufacturing meaning doesn't sit well. Meaning is a divine sort of magnetism. It's not some widget you fabricate; it's missing pieces of your self that you stumble upon in the ether and coax back to your soul with the labor of your belief. You are drawn to it as it is drawn to you. It is you. And like love, with it's missteps obscured among rosy shadows, we can and often are, breaking our ankles in pursuit. There is a sense of luck to meaning, or divine providence, a gift unique to you, precious and offered with the quality of actual price.less.ness. It exists beyond any category of value because if you bend your life around it, it promises a life that makes sense. And without it, what else possibly could hold value?

We can't manufacture meaning anymore than we can manufacture love. Not if we want it, for lack of a more appropriate cliche', to mean anything. Love and meaning meet between worlds. They are omnipresent in the unknowable expanse just as much as they are nurtured and destroyed in the dark animal testing lab of our pernicious individual will. They are as much of us as they are beyond us and the quest to unite them is almost certainly the most essential conflict of the conscious ape.

I have always followed my sense of meaning with a reasoned conviction that it must be what I was supposed to do. But mine seems crafted by some exuberant cruelty and as I am older now, I am not so easily tricked by existential hormones. I have no such convictions to its calling anymore. Burn the pyre. Scatter the dirt. 

Manufacturing meaning is like cherishing a synthetic memory. It's a half-hearted death; it's half the bottle, it's across the tracks - not down. It is an intolerable whimper. Instead, I can aim to ignore that hopeful gust and sudden silence, that prescient moment where meaning haunts my fairy tale heart. I can turn away from that jaded imposter and be more present, less sure, more studious of my instincts and more responsive to the entropy that inevitably whispers to the aged. 

I can not run from meaning, but I do wonder what I will hear, when I stop pretending I understand.