CHAPTER 30

The Way of the Meaning-Maker

When our youngest daughter came home from college at Thanksgiving one year she gave me a coffee mug as a present. The motto on the coffee mug read: “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” “Isn’t that your philosophy in a nutshell?” she laughed. She was exactly right. “Anonymous” had captured the essence of two centuries of existential thought: that life is as much a responsibility as a gift and that each of us is honor bound to create ourselves in our own best image.

I make my meaning; none exists until I make it. All that exists until I make personal meaning is the possibility of meaning. There is the possibility that I will experience the next hour as meaningful. There is the possibility that I will experience my relationship with my mate and children as meaningful. There is the possibility that I will experience my life as meaningful. If I do not make the meaning that is waiting to be made, I’ll have squandered the opportunity to live life on my own terms.

It doesn’t matter that you have a sanctified study, a fast computer, a great idea, a splendid way with commas, or any other writer’s tool or habit, if you don’t also adopt the mantle of meaning-maker and announce, especially to yourself, that you must create the meaning in your life. Unless you inhabit existential space in precisely this fashion, as a meaning-maker the chances are great that you’ll opt for a respectful silence as you wait for meaning to drop into your lap.

To stand up as a meaning-maker is a revolutionary stance. The groundwork for this revolution has been laid by 200 years of movement toward a single idea: that life can have meaning even if the universe has none. While each of us is limited by circumstances and by our appetites, defenses, and other frailties and realities, we are nevertheless free to choose what meaning we intend to make. This nature has granted us. I get to decide what will make me feel righteous and happy and so do you. Your life has meaning only when you invest it with meaning.

You are the sole arbiter of the meaning. The second you turn to someone else and ask “What does life mean?” you’ve slipped into a way of thinking that courts inauthenticity and depression. The second you agree with someone simply because of his position or reputation, whether that someone is a guru, author, cleric, parent, politician, general, elder, editor, or literary agent, you fall from the path of personal meaning-making and become flimsy and ordinary.

You and you alone get to decide about meaning. That is the awesome proposition facing every contemporary person. As limited as we are in a biological and psychological sense, we are exactly that free in an existential sense. If we do not live that way, honoring that existential freedom, we get nightmares and panic attacks. If we do not live that way, we find ourselves wishing that we had opted for authenticity and decided to matter. If we do not live that way, we wish we had.

Maybe it is painful for you to think that you are a disposable throwaway in a meaningless universe and that there is nothing you can possibly do to alter that reality. Let that pain go right this instant and announce that meaning can still exist, just as soon as you make some. The split second you do this, all previous belief systems—those that told you what to believe and those that told you there was nothing to believe—vanish. You get to let go of wondering what the universe wants of you and the fear that nothing matters as you proudly announce that you will make life mean exactly what you intend it to mean. What a triumphant announcement!

To be sure, after that triumphant announcement there you are, exactly where you were the moment before. Has anything changed? Yes, something vital. The instant you realize that meaning is not provided (as traditional belief systems teach) and that it is not absent (as nihilists feel), a new world of potential opens up for you. You suddenly have the philosophical and psychological pillars to support your new meaning-making efforts. You break free of tradition, with its restrictions, demands, and narcissistic bent and set out to make your life a thing of value. You haven’t made it that thing yet, simply by announcing your intention. But you’ve aimed yourself in a brilliant direction: in the direction of your own creation.

This path may not sound all that radical, but it is. It is a radical departure from the traditional path because it blasts all received knowing out of the water. Its central tenet, that you must decide for yourself, is exactly the following announcement: you create your universe from your best understanding of what is right, what is good, and what is valuable. Nothing and no one is allowed to prevent you from deciding what values you intend to uphold and how your righteousness and heroism will play itself out.

It is an equally radical departure from the forlorn postmodern position, which moves from what is likely a fact, that we are throwaway creatures deluded about our own importance, to the unwarranted conclusion that life is not worth taking seriously. The conclusion is unwarranted because it takes a certain thought and a certain feeling, that we do not matter and that despair must follow, and elevates them above an equally available thought, that life can be lived seriously, and an equally available feeling, that of full engagement. You trump nihilism with the amazing announcement that meaning is exactly as available as meaninglessness.

The way of the meaning-maker is a path to make a person proud. You heroically step out into the blinding light of reality, look around, and say, “I am going to do this and I am going to do it for these reasons.” You make the next hour meaningful by investing it with your capital, your intentions, your energy, and your decisiveness. You make the hour after that meaningful in exactly the same way. You do this hour in and hour out, year after year, sometimes sitting and staring, sometimes hugging and kissing, sometimes working ferociously, always for reasons that you deem important. You aren’t a god—you are too earthbound for that. But you are the best human being you can make yourself, the one you had always hoped to see in the mirror.

That is the writer’s existential position, her existential space, her existential shout. She makes the calculation that her best bet is to act as if her life matters and her writing matters, and she seals the deal by actually writing. At the end of the day she is repaid by the feeling that she gave life a bloody good shot.

LESSON 30

Waiting for meaning is a mistake. Seeking meaning is a mistake. Accepting meaning is a mistake. Bemoaning the absence of meaning is a mistake. The only authentic path is to make meaning. You stand up, gather your wits, and exclaim, “I have decided!” Then you clap yourself on the back and get started.

To Do

1. Bring forward a writing project that best resembles “an investment of meaning” and launch into it.

2. Design a “way of the meaning-maker” crest and sew it into all of your clothes. Or, less fancifully, make an effort to educate yourself about which of your projects hold the most meaning for you. Annotate your to-do list of upcoming writing projects with your thoughts about the meaningfulness of each project on the list.

3. Picture the next hour “devoid of meaning” and then picture it “brimming over with meaning.” What did you just learn?

4. Look back (in your mind’s eye) at the writing you’ve done over the past year or two. Can you discern which pieces felt more meaningful and which felt less meaningful? Do the more meaningful pieces share anything in common?