September 11th

Conundrum

Which came first,
Experience or meaning?


When we were children, a favorite riddle used to be, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" This conundrum was so sticky that it stayed with us even into adulthood and became a cliché indicating any difficult situation of logic. Maybe meaning in life is somewhat arbitrary. People go to work, and their work becomes part of the meaning to their lives. People marry and have a family and declare that these are the most important things to them. If they had taken different jobs, or if they had married a different person, or if they had renounced the world and had become nuns and monks, wouldn't their lives have had different meanings?
And then we have the people for whom life dictated so many of their meanings : A person with physical deformities will have a much different life than one born healthy. Someone born into a wealthy, aristocratic family will obviously have a much different outlook than a beggar's child. Someone born in Asia will look at life differently than someone born in Europe.
So which comes first, those who say that meaning comes from our definitions, or those who declare that our circumstances determine our meaning?

Personal Interpretation

 To some extent, experience determines meaning and meaning determines experience. The two are interwoven in this tapestry we call life. We may accomplish certain goals and declare that they give our lives meaning because we have accomplished them, or we may seek a certain kind of meaning and find it in these things, allowing that quest to dictate the things that matter for us. Most of us engage in both behaviors at some time or other.

I would argue that meaning is something which we construct for ourselves. We simply are. What we do with our existence is up to us. We must be invested in life; it must come to mean something for us. Sometimes we can intuit what will motivate us to live the best possible lives before we experience much of the world, but that meaning morphs as we encounter the people, places, and ideas which will come to constitute our frames of reference. For many of us, it is difficult to know where to start constructing meaning. Sometimes we must simply start somewhere. The more experiences we have, the more we will come to understand who we are, what our place in the world is, and what matters most to us.