Stop Making Sense
My friend arrived at our coffee date furious with her yoga instructor.
“This woman kept us in triangle pose for ten minutes while she went on and on about Viktor Frankl and how life is all about the meaning you give it. She told us how she’d decided to give her own life a positive meaning. And she NEVER ONCE mentioned that Frankl was in a concentration camp, not a communal art space in Brooklyn.”
I laughed. It’s funny how Viktor Frankl gets invoked when people want to tell flattering stories about their lives. But Frankl also wrote about self-transcendence: the idea that meaning comes from devoting ourselves to something beyond ourselves. Another person. A difficult task. A moral obligation.
“Meaning” is a squirrely word. For Frankl, it wasn’t necessarily a story we told about our lives. It was something life asked of us, especially when we were stripped of our usual forms of control. But in our culture, meaning can just as easily refer to the stories we tell to avoid feeling the vastness and terror of life. Our search for meaning can become a search for anesthesia.
We do this all the time. Someone breaks up with us, and we announce that the universe removed this person to make room for someone better. We experience a devastating loss and immediately try to find the lesson in it. We make our careers and children chapters in our personal epics, rather than simply responsibilities we’ve been entrusted with.
It’s not that any of these interpretations is necessarily wrong. It’s that our insatiable desire to make sense of life can prevent us from fully living it.
Stop making sense. The next time you catch yourself rushing to turn an experience into a story, see what happens if you stop. Return to the simple sensations of breathing and being in your body.
Let life be a mystery you’re here to inhabit, not a puzzle you’re here to solve. There’s a whole world waiting for you beneath your explanations.
As always, if you’d like to be held through your own process, reach out and we’ll set up a free coaching call.
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