Comment on Finding/Cultivating Meaning

A friend of mine, also living and working abroad in the international school circuit, confided by email that she was feeling the pangs of homesickness, dearly missing the familiarity and comfort of home, and the supportive presence of family.  While it was not explicit in her writing, the feelings provoked the following reflections, on finding and cultivating meaning.

I imagine being an empath, with the ability to read, instantaneously, the lives of others, inhaling, as it were, the entirety of their life experience.  With this gift, if it were a gift, what might I learn about our human condition?  How might I response?

Foremost, I imagine experiencing a deep level of compassion:  compassion for an individual's longing for connection and sense of purpose, particularly when the forces -- both internal and external -- arrayed to maintain them in the same position, seem so absolutely overwhelming.  I believe that I'd want to help, were it possible.

I imagine I'd experience terror:  terror at the realization that we are, for all practical purposes, completely and thoroughly mechanical:  conditioned, passive and associative, held rigidly in place by patterns of habit, imagination and the opinion that we are already free.  I believe the most terrifying realization of all would be that of crystallization:  that, despite outer appearances, we are constrained by time, becoming increasingly rigid, and ultimately fixed, with no further possibility of change.  In this sense, the science fiction image of the zombie is not fiction, it is a psychological reality, more easily observed in others than ourselves.

From a biological view, I imagine realizing that we are, essentially, food processing machines, designed to ingest and metabolize food, creating fuel for general functioning, and expelling what for the apparatus is waste, all conditioned, all mechanical, all serving a purpose other than our own.  

So far it's not looking too good.  

I believe a search for meaning requires, foremost at the start, the ability to observe myself, from a position a little outside of life, outside of personality and spin of life, to be practiced daily, lifelong, cultivating ever so gradually a relatively stable place from which to observe, only to observe, a little less identified, a little less reactive, a little less susceptible to externals, a little less a silk banner blown about in the wind, diverting a little of that food energy into another vessel, for oneself, gradually creating a center of gravity for the further growth of this new observing I, about which we might align ourselves, and design strategies for feeding, everyday, all day, lifelong.

I had dinner the other night with a colleague here who spoke of having, in the recent years, bottomed out:  having felt that she had lost everything, alone in a strange place, utterly shredded, disemboweled, dis-illusioned.  She spoke of the importance of the experience:  the awakening of something new in herself, a new sense of clarity, resiliency and meaning, as if she had discovered, as a consequence of a great shock, something in herself that was substantially more real and purposeful, as if layers of pettiness had been burned away, though in the moment it was none too pleasant.

I am living with a new realization -- more a rooted feeling/sensation than an idea solely, as I would have held as a younger guy.  I know that this realization is, in part, a consequence of several deaths of close friends and family members, and influenced by my living here in Senegal, which has provoked many questions related to meaning.  I have been chronically ill over the past few months, being partially deaf for several weeks which, interestingly, has served to help define and clarify this change, which is no longer disconcerting, as I perceived it while still in the States.  

I will die.  My time here is limited.  And the question arises, how shall I conduct the rest of my life?  Can I cultivate a line of presence, or points, between now, and then.  

That is very meaningful.