Meaning (Found, Not Assigned)
Are you where you thought you would be
For much of my life, I thought the meaning of your life was something we figured out early and then followed. A direction. A calling. A clear sense of purpose that, once discovered, made decisions easier and life more understandable.
That idea sounds comforting. It just didn’t match how life actually unfolded.
Meaning, as I’ve come to understand it, isn’t assigned at the beginning. It’s revealed along the way. Often slowly. Often unevenly. And usually only in hindsight.
There were long stretches of my life when I was busy, tired, or simply doing what needed to be done. At the time, those years didn’t feel especially meaningful. They felt necessary. It was only later that I could see how much of who I became was shaped during those ordinary, demanding seasons.
I’ve noticed that meaning doesn’t always show up in big decisions or defining moments. More often, it appears in small acts — showing up when it would be easier not to, staying with something that isn’t glamorous, caring for people and responsibilities that don’t offer recognition or reward.
Meaning also seems to change over time. What mattered deeply at one stage of life can loosen its grip at another. That doesn’t make the earlier meaning false. It simply means it belonged to a different season.
I used to think meaning required clarity. Now I’m not so sure. Some of the most meaningful parts of my life came during periods of uncertainty — when I didn’t know where things were headed, but kept moving forward anyway.
Meaning isn’t always found in success. Sometimes it grows out of failure, loss, or redirection. Paths that didn’t turn out as planned can still carry meaning, even if it takes years to recognize it.
I’ve also learned that meaning isn’t something you demand from life. It’s something you notice. It emerges when attention, acceptance, and compassion come together. When you stop asking “What should this mean?” and start asking “What is this shaping in me?”
As I’ve grown older, meaning feels less like a destination and more like a pattern. A thread you can trace backward through your life — connecting experiences that once seemed unrelated.
Maybe meaning isn’t something waiting to be discovered somewhere ahead of us. Maybe it’s something quietly forming as we live — revealed not by searching harder, but by paying closer attention to the life already being lived.
I have so many instances where things just seemed to go wacky. If it were not for those things that seemed like roadblocks, I strongly believe my life would not have turned out in the way it has. Life’s journey is not meant to be all wine and roses, but also thorns picked up from time to time to awaken us and get us back on track. I remember a time in a study group when we were trying to discover our purpose. I tell you what we came up with did not match what I ended up with, and that’s for certain. As Forest Gump stated, life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you are going to get.