If you agree with natural psychology's view that meaning is primarily a subjective psychological experience (powerfully affected by a person's idea of meaning and her evaluation of life as meaningful or not), if you further agree that what follows from this observation is the realization that you can make meaning (or at least significantly influence its arrival), and if you also agree that nothing is really more important than making and maintaining that meaning, then it follows that you will want to make meaning on a daily basis. What follows are fifteen tips for doing exactly that.
First thing each day, orient yourself in the direction of meaning. Rather than starting your day by worrying about your daily tasks and everything looming ahead of you, rather than orienting yourself toward your day job and your everyday pursuits, spend a minute or two quietly and calmly asking yourself, “Where do I intend to make meaning today?”
You look at your day and you thoughtfully make decisions about where you want to invest meaning. This process sounds like: “I'm investing an hour first thing on building my home business, then I'm adopting a calm attitude as I commute to work, then at work I'm staying in meaning neutral for most of the day except for my morning meeting with Bill, where I want to invest myself and aim for a certain outcome. Then more calmness as I commute home, and then a nice vacation from meaning and a little enjoyment as I cook and listen to music, and then an hour investment in my business and a ten-minute investment in a quick call to my sister. Then a final meaning investment in peaceful sleep as I go to bed calmly and sleep like a baby!” As long as it took you to read all that, it would take you hardly a second or two to think it—after which, you would be nicely oriented toward the meanings of your day.
Maintain one ongoing meaning investment of the doing sort or of the being sort, which you attend to first thing each morning, before your so-to-speak real day begins. In this way, you make meaning first thing each day, and that effort builds up meaning capital over time, significantly inoculating you against meaning crises.
Although the distinction between being and doing is artificial, the following will give you a sense of what I mean. Being practices might include sitting meditation, walking meditation, tai chi, or yoga, even though all of them also have a doing component. Doing practices might include writing your novel, building your home business, working your recovery program, working your anxiety management program, and so on, even though each of them also has a being component.
You can choose any prospective meaning opportunity and practice it first thing each morning. Over time, this becomes the place where you make an ongoing meaning investment in a regular, routine, daily way.
You may hold writing your novel, building your home business, or nurturing your relationships as your greatest meaning opportunity but simultaneously hold staying sober, dealing with your meaningless job, or handling some aspect of your formed personality as your greatest meaning challenge. Take daily aim at these meaning challenges.
If, for example, your greatest meaning challenge is that you manage to form rich intentions but then fail to align your thoughts and behaviors with those intentions, then you would mindfully take aim at aligning your thoughts and behaviors with your intentions. You would announce to yourself every day how you were going to do exactly that. This might sound like: “I want to create that nonprofit I've been dreaming about for fifteen years, and so today I am going to create a couple of thoughts that support my intention and think them every hour on the hour. I'm also going to take the first baby steps in the direction of starting my nonprofit by buying some nonprofit guides and by chatting with Jill about how she started her nonprofit.”
In addition to seizing meaning opportunities on a daily basis, you also take direct aim at your greatest meaning challenges on a daily basis. You name your greatest meaning challenge, rather than ignoring it and refusing to think about it, and then you announce what you are going to do to meet that challenge today.
Each day is its own context, each hour is its own context, and each minute is its own context. That's why now is at once so rich and so difficult! It is a particular now that must be lived on its own terms and as its own situation.
It may not prove meaningful for you to sit for two hours on a bench in front of your supermarket. But it may prove wonderfully meaningful for you to sit for two hours on a bench in front of a small grocery store while you're traveling the back roads of Italy. Those are quite different contexts. The same activity might provoke the psychological experience of meaning in one context and not in another. Working on your novel might be the thing to do, come hell or high water—but if your child falls down and skins her knee, then attending to her and not working on your novel is clearly the thing to do.
Three p.m. today when your boss says something rude to you in a slightly more injurious way than usual, speaking up may be the thing to do—or keeping silent may be the thing to do. That will be its own situation with its own particularities and you will get to make meaning right then and there, on the spot, in that situation. Life is a series of unique situations, and we make meaning not by adhering to abstract principles about how we should live but according to the reality of each moment.
Take notice throughout your day of the time looming up ahead of you and announce to yourself how you want to be with it—how you want to be with that meeting that's coming up in five minutes, how you want to be with your lunch hour, how you want to be as you settle in to return a difficult email. You surveyed the day first thing that morning and made certain decisions, which was a great practice; now the living day is transpiring in real time, and you need to make new decisions as new situations present themselves.
Like many of the other practices I've been describing, this activity of noticing and announcing takes only a second. It isn't a burdensome practice that takes a lot of time but rather is a practiced instantaneous check-in with yourself in which, for example, you remind yourself that you want to be calm or assertive or a little extra attentive or meaning neutral. In a microsecond, you make meaning by adding a bit of mindful attention to the current situation or an upcoming situation.
Remember that free time is not necessarily easy time. Those two hours in the evening when you have “nothing to do” and can do “whatever you want” need to be treated as mindfully, carefully, and seriously as any other two hours of your life.
You can spend them calmly in meaning neutral, if you like, but on some evenings, that will not be the way you actually want to spend those two hours. Trying to spend them that way will leave you bored and upset and in a mini-meaning crisis. Free time is time that must be treated with as much consideration as all other time.
All of this consideration, thoughtfulness, and effort in no way preclude the possibility of spontaneity, relaxation, just being, and other easier ways of being. In fact, life may get easier if you are living as an adherent of natural psychology because, on the one hand, you have a good idea of how you want to represent yourself and make yourself proud, and on the other hand, you know that you have permission not to struggle all the time with meaning. In this way, you get the best of both possible worlds: a clear picture of what you're intending and a clear picture that you need not struggle to make every moment feel meaningful.
On a given day, this can play itself out as an hour of intentional meaning-making, followed by a complete opening to whatever wants to happen, followed by some more hours of intentional meaning-making, followed by great and sublime ease. By not feeling like you're on some endless quest, as a seeker of meaning does, you can take it easy any time you like. Indeed, you may want to devote a portion of every day to this deep ease.
You do not need to invest meaning only in activities like building your business, writing your novel, being of service, or relating. You can also invest meaning in a particular way of being. That is, you can choose a way of being—say, being calm, being open, being compassionate, and so on—and invest meaning in being that way.
On a given day, this might mean the following: You might decide that your only goal for the afternoon is to remain calm. You see an array of stressors on the horizon for the afternoon, and you decide that what will serve you the most is dealing with them calmly—that being calm is the work. Maybe this means doing something like practicing an anxiety management technique or aligning your thoughts with your intention. But as the afternoon unfolds, it is all about being and not doing—it is about actually being calm. Remember that mindfully adopting an attitude is as much a feature of making meaning as is mindfully choosing an activity.
You have ongoing cognitive work to do to keep your thoughts aligned with your intentions. This work has a daily face to it as, today and every day, you make sure that you are thinking thoughts that serve you and disputing thoughts that do not serve you.
If, for example, you intend to make meaning by starting your home business and you hear yourself saying, “Wow, there's just too much to do,” right then and there, stop and remind yourself to what extent that thought fails to serve you. Right then and there, substitute a thought that does serve you and that aligns with your meaning-making intentions, a thought like, for example, Okay, what am I tackling first?
This is daily work and in-the-moment work, as it is in the moment that the thoughts that don't serve us appear. Again, this tip takes many words to say, but in actuality it will take you hardly a second to notice a thought that isn't serving you, dispute it, and substitute one that does serve you—hardly a second, that is, if you get in the habit of doing it.
You have ongoing behavioral work to do to keep your actions aligned with your intentions. This work also has a daily face to it as, today and every day, you behave in ways aligned with your intentions and as you refuse to behave in ways not aligned with your intentions.
Say you're building your home business and need a quote from someone regarding a web-building service. In your possession are three names to contact. The obvious behavior that aligns with your intention is to prepare your questions for these three people and then to contact them. As straightforward as that sounds, many if not most people will do other things so as to avoid the anxiety that naturally arises in such situations.
They'll tell themselves that they need five names rather than only three. They'll tell themselves that they need to become a kind of mini-expert on the subject and order three books before calling anyone. They'll tell themselves that although they've already figured out that they can't perform the service themselves, they will take a class to see if maybe they can learn to perform it. Instead of doing the thing that they know they ought to do, namely contacting those three people, they decide to do something else instead.
Every day, we must watch out that we aren't tricking ourselves into performing actions that aren't aligned with our intentions.
Remember that we have an original personality that we can never discern clearly, a formed personality that tends to restrict our freedom, and a certain amount of personality left, our available personality, with which we maintain self-awareness, calculate our meaning intentions, and manifest our freedom.
Every day, you call on your available personality to provide you with the means to realize your intentions. If you fall back on your formed personality and live life in a rote, mechanical way, you will repeat what failed to work in the past and you will stay as anxious, sad, and ineffective as you're accustomed to staying.
If you remind yourself each day that you want to lead with your strongest self, your smartest self, and your freest self, you give yourself the chance to realize the meaning intentions you form. Whether you call your available personality your best self, your highest self, or something else—or whether you give it no name at all—it alone provides you with the means to your ends. You can't be the value-based meaning-maker you would like to be unless you manifest your available personality in a daily way.
Once you've created a menu of meaning opportunities—that is, a menu of those things that matter to you or that match your idea of what constitutes value-based meaning-making—double-check that list, either daily or at least regularly. Try something on that list that you haven't tried recently or something high on that list that you keep avoiding. By checking your list, you remind yourself of all the meaning opportunities available to you—a reminder that amounts to its own sort of meaning boost. First, of course, you will need to create your list of meaning opportunities.
Human beings experience any and all of the following fifteen as meaning opportunities: love, good works, creativity, excellence, relationships, stewardship, experimentation, pleasure, self-actualization, service, career, contentment, ethical action, achievement, and appreciation. But of course your list must be your list. Parenting might be high on your list; parenting might appear nowhere on your list. Achieving might matter more to you than loving; loving might matter more to you than achieving. Check in with yourself regularly to see if you want to seize a meaning opportunity that you've been forgetting or avoiding.
Take quick action when a meaning leak occurs. Say that you run into your brother, who reminds you that you don't make much money at your career and will probably always be financially stressed. This may amount to an emotional blow, but it is also a meaning blow, and the meaning can leak out of your chosen profession if you take his words to heart.
On the one hand, you will need to deal with having just been emotionally battered. But you will also need to deal with the meaning part, maybe by mindfully reinvesting meaning in your profession right there on the spot. This might sound like, “Yes, poetry doesn't pay, but I'm a poet and that's how I make my meaning.” Or, “Yes, corporate law would certainly pay more than the legal aid work I do, but I make my meaning by serving.” As often as every day, a meaning drain or a meaning leak can occur. Therefore it is our daily work to deal with them instantly and on the spot.
Not only do you want to take quick action when a meaning leak or a meaning drain occurs, but you also want to remain alert to any special blows or circumstances that may affect your relationship to meaning.
Maybe, for example, you've been able to tolerate your day job because you like your boss. When a new, crueler boss takes over, that may amount to a special blow and may kill off the possibility of your job ever providing you with the psychological experience of meaning. These special circumstances must be dealt with as and when they occur.
Weeks and months may pass during which nothing dramatic occurs. But on a day when something dramatic does occur, it is your job to give your undivided attention to its reality and decide what you want to do to remedy or repair the situation. Maybe there's cognitive work to do, or maybe you'll need to take action. The idea of making meaning includes taking necessary action to deal with meaning crises and meaning challenges as soon as they occur.
Consider all of life as your practice and each day as a day to practice. Since your goal, if you agree that it is your goal, is to engage in value-based meaning-making, then the shorthand for your entire practice might be something like: doing the next right thing. Right in the phrase doing the next right thing doesn't precisely mean “ethical” or “moral” but something more complicated. It translates roughly as doing the next appropriate thing in the context of your life as your project.
This might sound like: “I see life as a complicated project in which sometimes I enjoy myself, sometimes I exhaust myself in the service of my work, sometimes I take vacations from meaning, sometimes I strive to satisfy my ambitions, sometimes I stop everything and seize an unexpected meaning opportunity, and so on. My daily practice is to mindfully manage this complicated thing that is the project of my life.” Every single day is the next day in the project that is your life.
If there is one steady, regular, overarching thing that you can do to deal with the challenges of being smart, it is making meaning on a daily basis. You do this arduous, important work even as meaning shifts—which is our next subject.