Meaning Is Something We Make

A small mark of punctuation can change an inquiry. “Empty and meaningless, and meaning-making” is not a list of three things. It places two possibilities beside each other: that life may not arrive with a meaning already attached, and that we continually make meanings within it.

Consider an unanswered message. The event is a silence. We may make it mean rejection, busyness, uncertainty, or nothing yet. The meaning can affect our mood and next action, even before we learn why no answer came.

Meaning-making is neither a defect nor an unlimited power. Our interpretations need to answer to evidence and to other people. Still, the meaning we first assign is not always a property of the event itself. We can look at how we arrived there.

Some find the thought of an unwritten meaning frightening. Others find space in it. The point is not to insist that life has no value or that every meaning is equally sound. It is to notice where we have treated a meaning we made as though it had been handed to us by reality.

What happened? What are we making it mean? What else would we need to know? Those questions can loosen a fixed story while leaving us responsible for the meanings by which we live.