standards

Meaning is a Verb

A Life Worth Living?

children playing- smaller

Amid the swirl of thoughts that reverberate throughout life experience, once in a while an interesting idea settles onto Quora, a question and answer website (registration required).  As often as not, users post answers which are more interesting than the questions themselves.  A few weeks ago, just such a response appeared in reply to the question ‘What makes life worth living?’

Many of us ponder this or similar questions, most often with little expectation of receiving a reasonable answer.  In this instance, a responder we will simply call “Jimmy”, a self-defined entrepreneur and ”a Wall Street investor” stated the following:

“Nothing makes life worth living. The fact that this is even a question underlines the lack of life itself to provide a natural answer.”

The phrase “the lack of life” presents a curiously pointed accusation—an accusation directed at reality itself. Jimmy seems to think life owes us something, that life is somehow deficient, leaving us to pick up the pieces so to speak. He continues “Most of life is a sentence [did he mean “sequence”?] of failures and pains, punctuated with only the briefest of moments of happiness.”  What’s wrong with this picture?  (more…)

Perspective I

persepctive - ParisIf you could do anything right now, anything at all, what would you do? Why? Here is a slightly different question. If you had no constraints, if you could cause one thing to happen in the world, what event or change would you choose? Now, consider that of all the things you could have chosen, you chose this (whatever that is). What does that say about you? About your orientation and desires? Do you express such interests in your day to day decisions?

When you begin to consider what you might do if you could do anything, what is your first and second thought? Hard to pin down? For many of us one of those thoughts will be negative—some reason we believe stands in the way of doing something we say we want. We bump our heads on that learned limitation some have called achievable belief threshold or ABT—which effectively stops us in our tracks. While our wishes reflect what is important to us, so do our beliefs in limits to our freedom to fully express ourselves. But are these limits real, imposed contrivances or excuses? (more…)

More Than We Are

If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it;
Every arrow that flies feels the attraction of earth.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

aspire - ap.jpg

What is meaning? How does any definition we choose relate to EveryDayLife?

While researching our burgeoning topic “Who We Are” and the general concept of meanings in our lives, we came across this post from November of 2012. It speaks personally to the question of meaning in a way no theory can. As you read the heart felt words of a “helper”, consider the question we asked last week: Is the world better today because you are in it? (more…)

Are we having fun yet?

Death of Democracy trimmed

Here we are. Now what? After an expectedly tumultuous 2017, when various civil liberties and protections have been spirited away, stolen in the night, brazenly ripped from our freedom clutching fingers, who are we and where do we go from here? This post simultaneously represents the end of the “Death of Democracy” series and the turn from explicit descriptions of socio-political situations toward explorations of intra-personal, psycho-social elements that form our experience of EveryDayLife. (more…)