Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) was a Holocaust survivor best known for his writing, including his book Night about his survival in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for being a human rights activist who fought against indifference and for the memory of Holocaust victims.
When I read Night, I learned that meaning is not an inherent thing in our lives. Instead, it requires us to be active creators who use our personal engagement and our memories to combat indifference. Wiesel wrote, “Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.”
A lot of people have written about meaningfulness, but it was when I read that book around 2000 that I began constructing the basis of my work over the last 25 years. I saw that my youngest efforts as a youth worker, popular educator, and community activist were forged in my life’s fires of trauma and determination, and keep molding me into a kind of DIY punk and hip-hop rabble-rouser.
It was around that same time that I began understanding Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the book by Paulo Freire (1921-1997) that has been a guidepost for my entire career. One of the many things he taught was that,
“In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.” (p. 44)
By making the line so clear, I saw Freire building on Wiesel’s belief that we have to do more than simply live; he showed me how there’s an inherently political tension within meaningfulness, in that what is meaningful for some can be oppressive to others. Freire suggested that instead of just hoarding power, meaningfulness requires us to take action for everyone’s interdependent liberation.
Maya Angelou (1928-2014) wrote about this too. In a book called Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, I read her charge that said, “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.” I was trying hard to make sense of writing back then, and Angelou’s words wound together with Weisel and Freire’s to give me a clarion call. From then on to today and for the rest of my life, I believe that its my job to find meaning in my words — and my all of my actions.
The mundane and the ordinary, the struggling and the striving, the accomplishments and the struggles, they are all mine. I’ve learned over and over that life is not about traveling along some kind of straight line. All of these great teachers have insisted to me that it’s a process of making meaning through the stories we tell, the ways we live, the things we do, as well as the places, the people, and the ways we exist.
If I’m a rodeo clown or a corporate exec, a poet or a dishwasher, a mother or a minister, the challenge is the same: Get engaged, make meaning, liberate ourselves and others, repeat and recycle, over and over, endlessly and throughout life.
I’ve discovered that I’m nearly fixated on making meaning from life—including letting life be meaningful in all of its ways without me making anything. This might be our greatest charge.
Want to do something right now? Here are some actions you can take immediately.
10 Ways to Make Meaning in Life
- Listen to Everyday Voices: Look for times in your life where you can make bland interaction into something genuine and real, like a at a grocery store or in a brief convo with a coworker. Meaning can be found in the inflection and the intent behind the words, not just the words themselves.
- Resist Apathy. Meaning is the opposite of indifference. Look for one small thing today where you usually don’t care or look away, and choose to pay attention instead. Look, listen, and hear what’s being said. Meaning can be the byproduct of refusing to be apathetic.
- Restore Humanity. We can all be restorers. You’ve seen the social media videos where they make century-old toys look brand now? Restoring humanity means finding meaning in moments where we refuse to mirror current realities, including the aggression, apathy, or suffering shown to you. Stop! Instead, act in a way that humanizes both you and the person you are in conflict with.
- Life Your Case Study. Whether big or small, all of our lives are always in transition. Look for the “data” in the everyday things you’re going through and become the leader of the resistance in your own life. Find meaning in the physical, emotional, mental and social evidence of your own ability to adapt to new things, places, abilities, and outcomes in your own life. Stop being bullied by living. Take control!
- Act Interdependent. As Dr. King taught, we are all together in an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” Look for a moment in your life where your success is tied to someone else’s. Meaning isn’t found in “hoarding power,” but in the “We.” Identify one thing today you can do to make someone else’s burden lighter while also freeing you from “oppressor” thinking.
- Walk Unstraight Lines. When things go wrong or the day feels crooked, look for the meaning in the detours. If life isn’t a straight line, then the challenges and mistakes we have are actually the texture of our stories. Find the value in the jolt and learn from it when you’re ready.
- Find Meaning, Don’t Make It. Look for one thing today—a sunset, the breathing of your dog, the calmness of a good drink, a child’s laughter—that is meaningful simply because it is, requiring zero effort from you.
- Feel the Rhythm of the Struggle. Even in our challenges there are patterns, beats for us to step to. Look for meaning in your effort itself, regardless of the outcomes. Whether you are a retired or just starting, the meaning is in the “doing.” Acknowledge the dignity in the manual labor or the stanky, dank walls of a difficult place. Feel that rhythm, even when it sucks.
- Doing Meaning. As communicators, we are constantly sharing either explicitly through talking, writing, body language, or signals, or implicitly through feelings, ideas and reactions. We should do meaning by looking for the clarion calls in our everyday actions, interactions, reflections, reactions, or responses, whether we hear or think or paint or sing them. Meaning is found when we take raw emotion and forge it into expressions. Look for one thing today that feels “truest” to your experience, and do meaning.
- Uncover Ghosts. Look in your own past—either from long ago, or from yesterday—for where your ghosts became scars. Don’t cover them. Instead, let them now give you insight. Meaning is found when we see that our past pain currently functions as empathy for others, sometimes in really specific, direct ways, and other times as a shining, jingling generalization that covers your entire life.
The Personal Engagement Institute 