When the alarm clock goes off in the morning, one though zooms through many of our heads, “I want to stay asleep.” Many of us moan and groan as we continue to hear the buzzer-which gets louder every second since it is truly designed to get us out of bed.
After about 30 seconds, most of us will stumble to the alarm clock, add another 15 minutes to it and go back to bed. It takes me probably 8-10 minutes to return to sleep and it seems that, in no time, we hear that buzzer penetrating our senses again. Why can't we just stay in bed? Why won't our alarm clock just let us off the hook this one time so we can continue to bask in the luxury of blissful sleep?
This struggle to get out of bed that confronts many of us every morning highlights one of the most enduring and sometimes difficult but ultimately fulfilling universal truths: our lives represent a continuous struggle to find and apply meaning.
Just think of the following days in your life:-Your first day at school.
- The starting day of a favorite project of yours.
- The day of your first date.
- The day of a major game or competition.
Did you have trouble getting out of bed on these days? Probably not (and if you did I bet it was because you were anxious to confront such exciting and important moments in your life) and I will submit that the reason these days were fulfilling (though not necessarily a bed of roses) was that each of these days was infused with a sense of meaning and relevance.
However, the truth is most of our lives just don’t feel that meaningful; that is they lack that special sense of natural, innate, embedded meaning that made it us so badly want to wake up and experience the milestone events I just mentioned. This is because most meaning just does not come along naturally. Meaning belongs to the individual and it is up to each of us to find it…in ourselves!
Okay, most of us don’t lie awake at night wondering whether our life has meaning and purpose. We are just too preoccupied completing our homework, going to our jobs and desperately trying to buff up our resumes before we apply to college. But if we are to live lives full of zest, joy and satisfaction, then we must know what really matters to us.
As the motivational writer Chuck Gallozzi wrote: "What then is meaning? It’s a personal reason for our existence. It’s a reason to get out of bed in the morning. It is not a matter of searching for some ethereal, profound, and mysterious meaning, but merely of choosing what to dedicate our life to, for the purpose of life is to live a life of purpose. In other words, the meaning of life is to live a meaningful life. We create ourselves with the power of thought, and we create our meaning with the power of choice.”
The search for meaning and the struggle to understand what factors influence our search for purpose is something that truly defines our existence and thus our literature. Ken Haruf’s novel Plainsong is the story of ordinary Americans struggling to live their lives and deal with the changes that come about in them over the course of one year. Thus it is also a story about the struggle to find meaning. Each of them deals in their own moving and poignant way. For example, there is the teenager Victoria Robideaux who struggles to find meaning until she accidentally becomes pregnant. There are the elderly McPheron brothers whose lives are virtually devoid of meaning until they make the choice to take in Victoria and aid in the struggle of another. There is the kindhearted, pragmatic teacher Maggie Jones who finds meaning by bringing others together. There is even Tom Guthrie’s depressed wife who despite a wife and two young boys is unable to find a reason to get out of bed. Sound familiar?
The search for meaning is never easy but it is vitally important. For evidence of this, look no further then Dan Buettner’s brilliant TED talk “How to Live to be 100+” in which he pointed out from research that one of the things common to people who live long is “a personal sense of purpose” and for a Japanese community he studied, their name for that personal sense of purpose is called “Ekigai “, which is an Okinawan word meaning “the reason I wake up every morning”. When I heard that, it resonated so deeply with me in the spirit of purpose not as some big grand goal or ideal in your head but one that is all pervasive and helps focus you day by day, moment by moment.
But there is something just plain magical about having that daily sense of purpose that makes you jump out of the bed, with praise in your heart, a dance in step, a twinkle in your eye and anticipation to DO something.
