How Can I Find Meaning In My Life?

In this talk, we explore the quest for meaning in life, and how we may be looking for it in the wrong places and in the wrong way. Mindful attention can bring forth a sense of meaning that we don't need to manufacture.

Transcript

Here we are on this dark, Cold evening, Middle of winter, And it's the beginning of a new year, And I hear many people talking about New Year's resolutions, Sometimes very specific ones about exercising more, Eating better, But many people, Some friends, Some of the people I work with in psychotherapy are asking, How am I going to find my purpose in life? How am I going to find meaning in my life? This is the year to do it, Especially at a time when so many things seem to be turned upside down and so many of our assumptions about life and about our world are being called into question. And people are asking, What is this all for? What's my life for? And it gets exacerbated, I think, By the digital world because we can look at all the lives that other people present to us on social media and feel like, Oh, Yeah, They've got it figured out. They know what their life is about, And I don't. And so it can generate a kind of existential confusion, Like what, What am I doing? What's the meaning of life? And I was remembering a teaching by Master Sung San. Some of you know him, The Korean Zen master who was the founder of the Kwan Om School. And when a student asked him, What is the meaning of life? He said, Human life has no meaning, No reason, And no choice. But we have our practice to help us understand our true self. And I can imagine that the student who asked the question was bewildered, Because most of us crave some sense of meaning. And it's really the craving that our practice can help us get in touch with, This kind of endless reaching for something more, Something outside of ourselves. Always kind of leaning forward, Looking for something we don't have. And we read from Barry Magid's book, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, Where he talks about the fundamental confusion we have about where happiness actually lives. And similarly, There's a fundamental confusion about where meaning and purpose in our lives actually reside. One Zen teacher talked about the wish to get out of the present moment, And that how we often feel like the present moment is just an annoying loading screen between memories of the past and plans for the future, As though really what we need is something we'll get. It's out there, And we're going to get it in the future. And so our practice tells us don't look to the future, Don't look outside of yourself, That meaning isn't to be found in the future, It's to be made in the present. That the purpose of life isn't discovered, It's cultivated moment to moment. Because I think what we really long for is not so much a meaningful life as to have the experience of feeling fully alive. Thinking about this made me remember a time in my own life where I really was struggling. I was really searching. What was my life about? What was my work going to be about? And I took a job that made me think I was going to have meaning and purpose. It was a job that people said would be a good job for me and that it had some prestige associated with it. And so I took the job and I thought this is going to do it for me. And what I realized was that the work itself, The moment to moment activity, Was actually quite deadening. For me it was what I thought was a job that would be teaching young psychiatrists and really helping excite them about the work that I found so exciting and enlivening that instead this job I had taken was a job of bean counting. It was a job of making spreadsheets and getting people to stay in line and follow rules. Absolutely deadening. And what I found was that for me that was the trap in searching for something outside of myself that other people suggested would be meaningful. Rather than paying attention to the moment to moment signals I got all day long about what was enlivening and what was not. And so I began to understand that our practice and my practice was to search for moments of real aliveness. And those moments come all day long. It could be cooking a meal with complete attention. It could be sitting and listening fully to a friend. It could be being absorbed in work, Even work that's dull, But fully giving ourselves over rather than constantly picking and choosing. Does this have meaning? Does that have meaning? Because it is really the quality of the attention that we bring to the moments that makes life light up. There are two designers at Stanford University, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, And they wrote a book called Designing Your Life. And they teach students about about how to think about themselves and how they want to live their lives. Now a lot of planning for the future, Thinking about the future, But what they come back to over and over again is finding moments of meaning in the present. And so they keep telling their students, Those questions about finding your true calling, Your true purpose, Your true passion, Don't get caught in that trap. Just pay attention to what's here right now in your heart and mind. One of the traps of trying to find my purpose is that it's all about the self, The search for my fulfillment, My legacy that I'm going to leave in the world. Because of course, Every time we try to look for this self, We can't find it. That this self I call Bob is just a collection of thoughts and sensations and ever-changing cells. These thoughts and feelings that are constantly coming and going in my body that's changing in every moment, That we are more a process than a thing, A flowing together of conditions. So the challenge is to shift the question from what's the meaning of my life to what's the meaning happening through this life. Thich Nhat Hanh taught about this very eloquently. He talks about inter-being, Where nothing is separate, So there's no me who finds meaning in life. He talks about seeing, For example, The cloud in the piece of paper, Because he can see the rain cloud that pours the rain onto the soil that had taken up by the roots of the tree that creates the wood that ends up as paper. And he reminds us that we are always inter-being with everything else, And so my life isn't a separate story that needs a separate meaning. No matter what narratives we create about a separate self, That we're always part of this vast web, And that meaning arises from how we participate in it. You know, In all the lives I've studied in my research, The happiest people were the people who saw themselves just as nodes in Indra's net. Nodes in a network of care and connection. So what then, What then do we do? Do we give up? Like ending the pursuit of happiness, Do we end the pursuit of meaning? Well, There is the concept of right action. Not right in the sense of right or wrong, But right in the sense of aligned, Really in harmony with reality. That it's the action that arises from attention just to this moment, Rather than distraction by some shiny bauble that we see in someone else's life, Or some badge of achievement held out to us by the world that says, Come get me, This will make you feel like life is meaningful. That we find action that arises from care in each moment, Rather than craving. And that when our actions are aligned and in harmony with reality, Meaning arises naturally, Moment to moment. We don't manufacture it, We simply create it. Certainly don't go out and find it. So when we find ourselves craving meaning and looking elsewhere for it, Looking at other people's lives, The question becomes, What am I avoiding? What am I avoiding in terms of this moment's experience? Because we can't find meaning in a life that we are not present for. The Buddha, The Buddha supposedly had final words. He was ill, He was dying, And the last teaching he gave to his sangha was, Be a lamp unto yourself. He didn't say to them, Go find the answers. He didn't say to them, Achieve enlightenment, Work really hard and get this thing we call awakening. He said, Be a lamp unto yourself, Bring light to where you are right now, To what you're doing right now, To who you're with. And when you find yourself asking, What's my purpose in life? Turn that question into, What's happening right now? What connection is the world offering me? Who or what needs my attention in this moment? Because what we know from our practice and from our ancestors is that meaning is found in these moment-to-moment connections, In the quality of attention we bring to this precious and fleeting life. Nothing fancier or loftier than that. So when Sung San said, Human life has no meaning, No reason, And no choice, But we have our practice to help us understand our true self. That wasn't all he said. He didn't leave his students just hanging. He went on to say, We can change no meaning to great meaning, Which means great love. We can change no reason to great reason, Which means great compassion. And finally, We can change no choice to great choice, Which means great vow and the bodhisattva way. That in each moment, We have the capacity to choose love, To choose compassion, To choose the bodhisattva way. And in this way, Just like ending the pursuit of happiness, We can end the pursuit of meaning and simply watch it appear moment after moment. Thank you.