Finding the Meaning

"If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things."
- Japanese poet Ryokan, as quoted in When Things Fall Apart, by Pema Chodron

We recently re-designed our home, turning the dining room into an office and our office into a bedroom for our older son. In the process we went through dozens of old file folders and an entire filing cabinet full of irrelevant financial statements, outdated teaching documents, and ancient health information. In my stack of folders I saved merely two inches worth of paper, most of it related to writing and some lovely quotes on the environment and spirituality. What didn't make the cut?  Endless projects filed away under "Green Team," "Celebrate Green," "Worms eat my Garbage," "How to Run a Marathon," "Best Triathlon Times," "Museum paychecks." The past ten years seem to have given birth to a myriad of projects and classes, all short-lived. How could I find meaning in this stack of refuse?

I have been chasing around after too many things. Relieved to at least see a few themes appearing, I was still bewildered by the rapidity with which I jumped from one effort to another. Nature abhors a vacuum, and I apparently have abhorred any downtime that could have been used for thinking or pondering meaning. Family life is hard and children are hard; my solution to the difficulty was to find something else to do and run after it as quickly as possible.

Hard on the heels of this realization was the instinct to go off and find another project! As I told a friend recently, it hasn't been comfortable to sit with my thoughts in the quiet house, remembering how I drove myself into the ground and thinking of what I can do differently now. If I want to pull any meaning from the tumult and pain of the past ten months, I'll have to sit and think, yet new ideas beckon, new workout schedules compile themselves in my mind. Change hurts. And yet, in ten years I don't want to sit down with another stack of file folders, wondering where the meaning was in all of my varied pursuits. I want to know what my life is about and be aware that I have spent the majority of my time and energy there.