The Ingredients of Meaning | Day 5 of 100

The Story of Two Summers

Looking for Meaning on the Mountaintops

The bar is sticky beneath my elbows and I'm on my second whiskey. I figured some booze would help with the jet lag, but it's not.

The bartender, points at me and I nod to indicate I'm fine. Back to my journal entry about the study abroad trip from which I've just returned.

Writing alone in public is important work—a signal to others you're unmended.

The bar in my college town is smoky and empty on a Sunday afternoon and I'm still in mourning. Since returning from Europe I've inked dozens of pages about the life I lived there, lamenting what I believed to be my boring and regular life here. No rambling cobblestone streets, no fresh croissants, no ancient cathedral bells chiming the hour.

"How can life here compare," I write, "to long days drawn out like a subtle song under the Spanish summer sun?"

This is often what happens when we have experiences that make us feel alive.

A trip, an adventure, a youthful memory, a season of life full of novelty and excitement that gives us goosebumps and makes our eyes glassy with happy tears.

In the midst of such chapters we see life in vivid color. We feel all is right with the world and we've finally figured out how to escape the mostly mundane passage of time. We think to ourselves, if I could just keep this feeling forever.

But it doesn't last long enough, and afterward we wonder why the band stopped playing.

We have these mountaintop moments where everything feels rich, just like we knew life could be, then the carpet gets pulled out and we hit the floor of our regular life again.

Dissapointment with ourselves, others and our life station often follows.

Making Meaning out of Mundane Moments

The summer after my big European study abroad trip I don’t get to do anything exciting.

No Eurotravel, no drunken nights with expats, no mountaintop moments on the other side of the world.

Yet, I find myself again at another musty bar in the same college town.

I’m working on my first beer, but as much as I want to drink it, it feels better to place it on my forehead for a moment and close my eyes. I’ve got cobwebs in my hair, I’ve sweat straight through my blue jeans, and I smell like a family of dead possums. My buddy Andrew and I just finished a grueling day of manual labor and we're so tired we can barely talk.

These hot months between semesters I’ve been working for Mr. Posner who owns a local electric company and is a big personality in our little Texas hill country town. We show up to his house on Saturday mornings where the front door is always open and Cats the musical is blaring on his speakers. Shouting over the showtunes, he slaps us on the back, asks us how hung-over we are, then points us to equipment he’s readied for the day and barks out marching orders.

My first day under his employ we drive to an old lady’s house he’s decided to care for. She's having electrical issues. He has me unload three spools of wire and drops them next to an opening beneath her pier and beam foundation. He takes his role as handyman for this woman seriously, and mutters something about how this world is going to fall apart if we don’t wake up and look after each other.

Posner tells me to turn around and threads three wires through my belt loop and orders me to wiggle through the opening beneath the house and meet him at the opening around the other side. I crouch down and look into a nightmare of cobwebs, rusty nails and the smell of death. He’s already halfway around the porch and yells out he better not beat me, so I scurry through this mess like I’m in basic training.

I make it quickly to the light on the other side, having digested a few pounds of cobwebs and thankful my tetanus shot is current. Like Aladdin escaping with the magic lamp from the Cave of Wonders, I reach for Mr. Posner’s hand, but he wants the wires before he’s ready to save my life. I hand over the goods and I’m halfway out of this seventh circle of hell when he asks about the smell.

I tell him I think that’s what death smells like, and he says it is - it’s probably dead possums. He tells me to stay there and returns with a trash bag, ordering me not to come back empty handed.

I trudge back through the underbelly of this old woman’s life, pondering what’s underneath the rest of our lives, curious how much Mr. Posner’s paying me - we never agreed on this - and wondering to myself: If these possums couldn’t make it out of this place alive, how is Mr. Posner so sure I will?

And does he even care?

I finally get to the possums - a whole family of them gone. On the trip over, I had the presence of mind to collect an old piece of rebar to help with the deed. Poking those possums into the bag felt like a violation of their resting place.

But I get the job done.

I emerge from under the house with a bag of bandicoot bits and Posner tells me nice work and says my next job is mowing gravesites at the cemetery.

I cannot escape death on this day.

His parents and grandparents are buried there, and over the years he’s taken responsibility for keeping friends’ eternal resting places cleaned up. He mutters something about people taking care of each other even when it’s not convenient.

My buddy Andrew and I load Posner’s work truck with a couple lawn mowers, a weed eater and drive the mile or two to the San Marcos Cemetery.

When you turn into the cemetery, you pass through a gate under low hanging oaks and wind your way up to the left where you park behind graves that slope down the hill. Logs are squared around the three downhill sides of each plot to keep the earth and the bodies in place.

We’ve just started mowing when a funeral procession rolls in. Out of respect, we stop and wait. We bake in the sun, clutching our ball caps in our hands while someone goes into the earth down the hill inside the elbow of the drainage creek. For a half hour, we stand next to our lawn mowers lurching low beside us like tired horses in the silent reverence of relatives we never knew.

It was that summer spent dragging dead animals out from underneath houses, chasing cats from crawl spaces, building fences, tending gravesites and climbing up into attics of abandoned homes that us boys figured out something new – something like the understanding of what it is to work next to someone, to find meaning in silent toil and quiet struggle when you have no idea what life or Mr. Posner is going to throw at you next.

And whatever knowledge we would gain in those moments of quiet was never mentioned. Our shared toil communicated all there was to communicate. Afterward we would sit in a dirty bar and eat a cheeseburger and drink a cheap beer with the world roiling around inside of us and, by osmosis, learn some lesson about hard work and brotherhood.

This is the story of two bars.

This phase of our journey is about understanding the differences between those two summers.

Each morning, we are presented with two ways of seeing the world.

Ask anyone to take their pick between wandering the streets of Barcelona or cleaning out old Ms. Bradshaw’s septic tank under a Texas summer sun, and the choice is pretty simple.

But—and this is the thing we must understand—our preferences have no effect on the potential power of a moment, or its meaning - if only we’re willing to see the meaning available.

Now, almost twenty years later, I’d give my left foot to crawl back into the crypt beneath that decrepit house. I learned just as much (or more) about myself riding in the back of Mr. Posner’s truck as I did sailing in the Mediterranean and I formed just as deep, if not deeper, relationships with the sweaty and poor college students under Posner’s employ as I did dancing the night away with fellow expats in discotheques across Europe.

Those long days count among the innumerable moments in my life where meaning was present in circumstances I didn't choose.

What is Meaning is Made Of?

I spent the entire summer working for Mr. Posner complaining to anyone who'd listen about how much better life was in Europe. How everything back home felt flat and meaningless and mundane. But I was clearly missing something it took me a while to understand.

Big moments are meaningful. No doubt. We're planning a trip to Europe this summer and I can't wait.

But what are we to do with the rest of our lives? Pine for the next adventure?

I don't want that. I don't think you want that.

The entire premise I'm trying to build here is that meaning doesn't magically appear. It's shaped by our perception, by how we see.

Recently some couple friends returned from a marathon trip to the Middle East for a wedding. Their photos were unbelievable. Over dinner I asked how it was and one of them said, "Awful. I couldn't wait to be home."

So it seems travel and other mountaintop life moments on which we place so much importance do not always cause one to feel as if their life is meaningful.

But for someone else, a trip to the grocery store can mean more than a dozen trips abroad.

It's our perception. It's how we see.

I've been working to identify the ingredients of meaningful moments so, when our perception is tainted by fleeting emotions, preferences or expectations, we can snap back into the present and make meaning now instead of waiting for it to be delivered to us by fate.

Let me know what you think:

Service

The most miserable people I know are the ones who busy themselves trying to fashion a life that suits their preferences. This was me for most of the last decade. I spent so much energy trying to implement personal development hacks like morning routines and productivity systems that never delivered what I thought they would. That’s because most of them are sold to us with the promise they’ll help us control our lives so we can get what we want. So we can be happy.

But the big story can’t only be about us getting what we want. As my beloved mentor, Earl Moseley, used to tell me, “Reagan, your life will get a whole lot more meaningful when you realize it’s not about you. When are you going to get out there and help somebody?”

This is deeper than service projects and volunteering and taking pity on the less fortunate. It’s not about a bait and switch: I help people so I can be happy.

It’s about understanding the way we use our energy. When we place our energy on the experiences of others, seeking to join their story and add value to their lives, we quiet the voice in our head that attempts to control our circumstances by bending life toward our desires. When we stop trying to control our circumstances, we stop expecting our lives to go a certain way. When we stop expecting our lives to go a certain way, we realize meaning was never connected to our preferences.

Service is not about being self-righteous. It's about discovering that when you focus your energy on attending to another’s needs, something shifts inside you. The voice that constantly evaluates whether you're getting what you deserve gets quieter. The anxiety about whether your life is going according to plan loosens its grip.

Connection

We're getting lonelier, and it's making our lives less meaningful. I don't know about you, but I grumble all the way to most social gatherings only to smile to myself on the drive home, thinking, I sure didn't want to go to that, but it was worth it. Time with people is always worth it.

How long will it take us to realize we are terrible judges of what makes us happy?

Being in the company of others, seeing their experience and being seen, sharing ideas and doing things in real life opens us up to ways of thinking we can't arrive at in isolation. I could reference studies about how relationships continue to be the single greatest factor in human longevity, but you know that. Despite all the studies, we still often prefer isolation to connection.

We overestimate our ability to figure life out on our own terms. We have access to unlimited information so it makes sense we believe we can learn and grow independently. But sports teams and religious gatherings and Alcoholics Anonymous and Rotary Clubs and being a regular at a coffee shop where the barista knows your name count for something that can't be replicated in solitude.

To be told something about yourself that you can't quite see, to be lifted up in a way you can't encourage yourself, to believe you belong when you feel the opposite—this happens in the company of others. Not because we need their approval to validate our existence, but because the meaning of our existence is most present in community.

Personal Transformation

We're wired to seek comfort, predictability and safety, but meaning emerges from the opposite—from choosing to change. When we’re engaged in the work of upgrading our beliefs or behaviors to meet our circumstances with more acceptance and willingness, we shake loose the voice in our head that wishes things would stay the same.

And we transform because we choose growth over control. We decide to participate in our lives with the belief there is something right here—not out there—right here to be embraced and inhabited.

Personal transformation isn't what we choose by default, but in hindsight, it's what causes us to label a season of life as important.

A friend who went through the pain of a miscarriage said it this way:

Looking back on our first miscarriage, I never would have imagined the meaning it created. Not at first, but it brought my wife and I closer together by forcing us to change our beliefs about family and fairness—enabling us to hold life more loosely. Now that we’ve received the gift of being parents I can see how that hard season and the changes it required prepared us in ways we could never have understood.

We experience meaning when we meet life on its own terms and rise to the occasion.

Our lives deepen when we we give ourselves evidence that we're not prisoners to who we used to be or how we used to see.

Every good story requires the hero to change something about themselves to navigate their circumstances. We watch movies, read books and recount the stories of our ancestors because we want to believe we too can transform.

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OK - that's what we're working with. The ingredients of meaning. What do you think? What's missing? What might you add?

Thanks for being along for the ride.