Thoughts on the Meaning of Life.

What is the meaning of life? Like everyone, I heard this question answered in so many ways. Of course, some answers were better than others. Some answers were fat with wisdom and altered the trajectory of my thinking. Some were heartfelt by those who spoke them, but for whatever reason, never resonated with me. Sometimes I deceived myself into believing I liked an answer more than I did just because I liked the person who spoke it. But never did I hear an answer that rose to the highest of bars and gave apodictic reason as to why we exist? They all fell short. 

Of course, tapping a keyboard with my directionally challenged fingers in an attempt to answer this impossible-to-answer question will likewise leave many people less than fully satisfied. To that I say good. I am not writing this to tell you what you should think the meaning of life is. That is a task only you can do for yourself. I am simply expressing what I think it is at this moment of my life. 

So, what do I think the purpose of all this existence is?  

Well, glad you asked. I think we are all here to learn to heal our trauma. Doing that, no matter what else our lives entail, can give it meaning.

Before I go on, I should clarify what I mean by trauma. Trauma is any pain that is beyond our ability to deal with it at the precise moment of infliction. It can be grandiose and horrific, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be something small that pings us when we are young or vulnerable. 

Whatever our trauma is, no matter how big or small, it is by this definition beyond our ability to deal with it, at least consciously. And because we can’t cope with it, we learn to numb the part of ourselves that was injured. This results in those injured parts of ourselves not being able to grow and develop with the rest of ourselves. Those traumatized aspects of ourselves stay stuck in the moment of injury. 

Most of the time, this process won't affect us noticeably for years. We get up seemingly uninjured from trauma, walk it off, and return to our regularly scheduled programmed lives as if nothing has happened. It's not till years later that we realize we are not able to accomplish something we want to do. We realize we are on a loop where we are facing different guises of the same problem over and over again.  We realize we are stunted in some way we can’t put a finger on. So we unpack our subconscious. We may go to therapy or head to the jungle to see a shaman. We may simply seek counsel from our friend. It doesn't matter. Whatever our process, we eventually arrive at some past event that we are stuck in. 

Doing this we may be able to, for the first time, fully take in a terrible moment of our lives from the vantage point of safety. Conversely, we may find something disappointingly dull. After years of struggling with a problem, we want its catalyst to be impressive. And sometimes it is embarrassingly minuscule. No matter how big or small our trauma is, it is always significant to us. And no matter what it is, we must find a way to love the version of ourselves that endured the moment of trauma. We must find a way to forgive, a less developed version of ourselves, for the way we handled it. To understand that we did the best we could at the time. Also, to realize that we can handle it better now. In forgiving these hurt versions of ourselves, we reengage those parts of ourselves. 

We all live different lives. But we all get bruised. Experiencing pain beyond our ability to deal with it is universal. Unfortunately, learning to heal the damage caused by these events is not. But it is how we grow. It's how we improve our lives.

Beyond bettering our lives, I believe there is a spiritual element to this. I am religiously unaffiliated. I am not a pure materialist, though. The idea that consciousness just formed from the right combination of molecules seems a bit forced. We can make many things with these base elements. But I don't see how we can create consciousness from these inanimate building blocks unless those elements are already conscious. So either all matter is conscious in some way we do not perceive, or consciousness comes from another dimension. 

I tend to favor the latter. Consciousness, it seems to me, flows through our chemical bodies the way electricity surges through a wire. And if that's true, then it stands to reason that as our meat suit dies, our consciousness goes somewhere.  Where it goes, I don't know. I won’t pretend to know. But I believe wherever we go, it benefits us greatly to be able to unstruck ourselves and heal trauma as it happens. I think that was what we were supposed to learn to do on this level of existence. 

Of course, Something as grandiose as the meaning of life is personal.

It will be different for everyone, as it should be. But this is why I think we are all here.