making meaning

I used to think that I need a central sense of purpose or meaning in my life before I could set meaningful, long term goals. After my recent foray into future success goals, I think the opposite is true:

Setting intuitive, long term goals can reveal important clues to what you find meaningful, and may even help you discover a deeper sense of purpose over all.

How do you set intuitive goals? It’s not as hard as it might sound.

Remember the “gotta get” goals meme? It’s a lot my approach to that.

Fire up your imagination, and project yourself into a blissful, satisfied and successful future. Look around. What do you see? What things around you, in that future, make you smile? What things make you feel satisfied?

What you see (or don’t see) will probably vary at different times, and there’s no pressure here. No worries about what is possible, or what you think you want, or what you think you should want. Just calmly, quietly let the image of a satisfied future develop around you.

Come back to the now, and bring those images back with you.

Write down what you visualized in that future.

Tada. Intuitive Goals! These goals aren’t necessarily things you need to plan to work on achieving, or even that you expect to achieve. They are just how you intuitively imagine success in your own life.

So, what meaning does that reveal?
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Last week, I introduced the topic of “meaningfulness” as it relates to artists and depression.

Today, I want to review and reinforce a few ideas about finding, making, and maintaining meaning, on a personal level. Looking over this list, I’m surprised that I didn’t realize so much of this earlier.

On the general size and shape of meaning:

• Meaning doesn’t come in just the extra grande sized servings; there are also little nibbles of meaning (popcorn purposes?). These bite-sized portions are functional and productive. I don’t have to find a purpose that gives meaning to my entire life…. just a meaning for why I’m doing this altered-book page, or this blog post, this painting, or this load of dishes.
• Meaningfulness doesnt have to be forever. It can be meaning for this afternoon, for a week, for a year. I may find a temporary meaning in discovering meaning. I may find temporary meaning in becoming organized.
• Meaningfulness doesn’t have to be worthy, by anyone else’s standards, or even mine, for that matter. A purpose doesn’t have to be altruistic, it doesn’t have to be lofty or idealistic or “for the common good”. If making a million dollars is meaningful for me… that’s a perfectly decent motivation, inspite of the mutters about “sell out!” that may come.

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Book Review: The Van Gogh Blues

Vincent Van Gogh is the poster child for the depressed, unstable artist, and a strong argument for the correlation between a troubled soul and brilliant creativity.

I refuse to believe that being creative means I’m doomed to a life of mental disorders. When a recent mood-funk sent me reeling, I set out on a search for information, ran across psychotherapist Eric Maisel’s work — and stumbled into one of those rare aHa! moments.

In The Van Gogh Blues, Maisel’s underlying theme is that creative-types are in the business of making meaning.

It’s what we do. We connect the dots from this to that, and draw lines between apparently random observations, until they mean* something. Then we invest and reveal the meaning to others in tangible forms: dance, music, words, and imagery.

So artists are driven by the need to express meaning - and when we loose that any sense of meaning in a project (or in our lives) we fall into what Maisel calls “a meaning crisis” (which seems to have a lot in common with a crisis of faith) Any number of things can cause a crisis in meaning; a goal that has been met, a change in life circumstance, a negative thought or doubt that springs seemingly out of nowhere and runs amok. But whatever the cause, if we don’t recover or reinvest a sense of meaning into our work and lives, depression, anxiety, addictions and a variety of other ills can take over. Only recovering a new sense of meaning will pull us out of it - at least that’s the theory and goal of Maisel’s “Meaning Therapy” [click to continue...]