Practicing and Cultivating Meaning.

In a culture of instant gratification and dismissive replacement maintaining a sense of meaningfulness is crucial for our wellbeing.

Photo by Moodywalk on Unsplash

The concept of something being meaningful has been getting a bad rap for a while now. It’s become viewed as synonymous with weighty, restrictive, and obsessive. Or it swings the other way and is viewed as the new-agey rhetoric of neo-Zen types who take a moment to give thanks for their wheatgrass juice. Either way imbuing something with meaning gets perceived as ruining it by weighing it down to feel important or falsely elevating it in an attempt to seem enlightened.

Genuine meaning isn’t about either of those things. Imbuing something with meaning isn’t about altering it or ourselves, it’s about connecting. Connecting with it and with ourselves. When something resonates with a core aspect or value within us we connect with it, it takes on a level of symbolic importance. It becomes meaningful.

As much as we need touch and human connection in our lives, and we do, we also need to have things which hold a sense of meaning. We need to have things which matter to us, which have importance. They play a major role not only in how we perceive and connect to the world around us but, even more importantly, how we perceive and connect with ourselves by acting as compasses of priority guiding us towards purpose.