The Search for Meaning, part one

I learned in business school that execution matters more than ideas in delivering value to the customer. I suppose that execution is similarly relevant in the search for meaning in the world. It has done me little good to sit on the couch and read amazing books, gaining knowledge and yet failing to process it into action. My world - hidden away in my mind - rhymes but it lacks rhythm.

I experienced a troubling period of boredom late in my stay in Finland, after many of my friends had left and all the "easy" things around to do had been done. I often went ice skating alone, or walked to the coffee shop and read. This was at the tail end of a particularly active period of time in my life - both Finland and before - but also foreshadowed a particularly frustrating period of inactivity over the six months following my return home.

I have continually attempted to deconstruct myself over the last several years, to attempt to understand what I am doing wrong and fix it. More than any external changes in our lives, internal ones require bravery. By the fall of 2008, I had already long wanted to make myself more a person of action. But despite my readiness, it was the external world that shoved me into action - I had merely to not resist. The period of time proved nothing of my ability to coerce activity from the world.

I didn't mind - indeed I basked in it - but I should have seen the recoil coming. I returned to what the persistent parts of my personality required me to return to - a frustrated introvert. The summer and fall of 2009 were painfully inert for me, as I waited in expectation of further opportunity to step up and shake my hand.

Failure: it has been said that the world looks like a nail to the man with the hammer. Perhaps I was guilty of seeing the world through one lens. I tried to fix the situation with medicine combined with thought, but I mistakenly believed that thought was the hammer and all change looked like a nail. Our minds are not so robust, but they can do an exceptional job of appearing to be to us.

Failure #2: we are all creatures of habit, but the variety of habits from one of us to the next is enormous. As much as true self-awareness cannot exist without honesty, we can be blindsided. I have crossed the boundary of the popular definition of "alcoholic" and returned, but my addiction was never physiological. My psychological addictions, numerous and robust, have required hosts of otherwise irrelevant habits. The search for meaning - marked by uncertainty, doubt, and fleeting solace - leads those of us compelled by its promise to places outside our discretion. I can not explain where the existential comfort comes from when I sit with my close friends at the bar, but I do not complain. I am happy there and with them, and if it is indeed a delusion that there is some grand reason for me to feel that way, then long live the delusion.