![]() This is a guidebook to it.Ī meaningful life is close to, but at points importantly different from, a happy life. A meaningful life can be simple in structure, personal, usable, attractive and familiar. There need be nothing forbidding about the issue. Yet, in truth, the subject is for everyone it is for all of us to wonder about, and define, a meaningful existence. Without always acknowledging it, we are – in the background – operating with a remarkably ungenerous perspective on the meaning of life. It wouldn’t be anything that could orient or illuminate our activities. If ever we did discover the meaning, it would – we suspect – in any case be incomprehensible, perhaps written in Latin or in computer code. Meaningful lives are for extraordinary people: great saints, artists, scholars, scientists, doctors, activists, explorers, national leaders…. A select few might be equipped to take on the task and discover the answer in their own lives, but such ambition isn’t for most of us. It isn’t anything an ordinary mortal should be doing – or would get very far by doing. The experience may be excruciating, it may feel like death, but there are resurrections every day.To wonder too openly, or intensely, about the meaning of life sounds like a peculiar, ill-fated and unintentionally comedic pastime. I have them squirreled away and they resurface from time to time to remind me what resurrection feels like.ĭead things can come back to life. It is during this excruciating experience that Amy drops these words like water to a thirsty soul: “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” These words wind tightly around the core of the story, offering hope and promising pain. Sethe is near giving birth when she takes up with the strange Amy Denver, who administers a type of primitive first-aid on Sethe’s painfully swollen feet. This scene, during which the protagonist, Sethe, who is on a dangerous route out of slavery, was a visceral reading experience for me. That frightening, life-giving quote from Toni Morrison’s Beloved.įour years ago, a friend brought Beloved to me in a stack of books after seeing my Facebook post requesting reading suggestions. And now I am dry.Īnd then yesterday, I saw the quote again. Yet, strangely enough, even though I persisted in my writing groups, neglecting these forms of written expression has inhibited my creativity. I thought if I stopped the output, things would be put right. I don’t like the rifts it causes, the loneliness I feel when friends shy away from something important to me. And I am not good with making people uncomfortable–I mean, I’m extremely good at it, I just don’t like it. I felt that, on a forum that’s supposed to be about friendship, it made my world very lonely–a funny story will get the likes, but my convictions will make people uncomfortable. Twitter and Facebook, however, invited unsolicited judgment. I absolutely love the beauty and positivity I find on Instagram, and it continues to hold distinctive value in my life. It happened when I turned from a social media that honed my writing skills (albeit in small bursts) to one that was visual. It happened when I became embarrassed over my blog–my thoughts and my feelings. Not as simple as not working on my manuscripts–it happened before that. My writer sister and I both concluded that, perhaps, if you don’t use it you actually do lose it. ![]() That is more than a dry spell, it’s when a place goes from being in a drought to becoming a desert. I never did spectacularly well with plots, but it has been 6 years since I have had a plot idea. ![]() Sitting in a train, the landscape sweeping past the windows, I looked at my writer sister–the one I spent my childhood and young adult life discussing future novels with–and I finally said it. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” ![]()
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