– A meaningful life draws upon, and exercises, a range of our higher capacities, for example, those bound up with tenderness, care, connection, self-understanding, sympathy, intelligence and creativity. 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. To wonder too openly, or intensely, about the meaning of life sounds like a peculiar, ill-fated and unintentionally comedic pastime.
0 kommentar(er)
