Carl Rogers

robertsloan2 2 years ago

Good review and interesting story. I wouldn't say any age is too old or too late to go through times of personal growth and learning to understand yourself and the world again. Life changes. Even someone successful in life often winds up neglecting some important aspect of inner life in order to achieve those accomplishments.

I think it's a healthy pattern of living to go through periods of introspection and reinterpretation. I stopped thinking of it as "the search for meaning in life" because I stopped expecting life to "mean something." I asked myself -- what meanings are people looking for in things that are entirely random?

I've had a hard life, a lot of obstacles many of them caused by physical disabilities I was born with or started so young in infancy that I might as well have been born with them. Most of it, I've got to look at that and say, like the fellow in Shawshank Redemption, "I was in the path of the tornado."

I didn't deserve it, anyone in that situation would've been treated badly and was. Times have changed and kids born with disabilities don't face some of the problems I did. Some of my disabilities are antique -- they're things that can be prevented now but weren't understood then at the age they could've been treated.

There's "meaning" in the religious sense for those who believe that their God makes plans for them, in which case the search for meaning goes to finding out what God wants and presumably trying to do that. Or change churches. Not being of that faith, that left me looking at a lot of people outside religion still "Looking for meaning in life."

What does that mean?

Does it mean that if your biography was written, someone would find a clear theme to it? That as a story, your life hangs together and has a meaning? Or does it more relate to things that are more tangible than meaning?

For me it's been questioning whether I achieved the goals I wanted and if so, if I liked the results. Asking what's the best way for me to live to be happy and accomplish what I want to do, those are my questions. I do go through that every now and then but it's not about "who am I?"

I know who I am.

I might be rare in that but I pretty much decided it at age four when I chose to become a writer. I knew I wanted to tell stories and write for a living. I've stuck to that goal and it's coming closer all the time.

"What next?" comes up hwen I'm a little farther down the road, but it mostly has the answer "More of that and enjoy my life" along with maybe finding love again. I've got a good relationship with my daughter and son in law and grandkids, whom I live with. I love my cat and their three dogs and their cat.

I have a lot of friends online and have been trying to build my strength so I can get out more during the summer. I've been housebound for most of the past decade with maybe one to six outings a year to go anywhere, so I guess I've had so much time at introspection that it stops being a question of finding meaning and more one of finding a way out into the world again.

It's human to seek patterns. It's human to think of everything as having meaning -- but those meanings are often within ourselves. Your dreams are full of interesting things your own undermind is trying to tell you.