How To Find Meaning In Every Day

This article showcases everyday meaning and suggests ways you can create and find meaning here and now, in your every day.

What Makes Life Meaningful?

When I sit at my desk, I am surrounded by:

• Photos of my loved ones, from childhood to old age

• Handwritten treasures: a short note from my Dad, a child’s invitation to Grandparent’s Day

• Bright visual icons, labelled Hope and Optimism

• Thank-you cards and a Father’s Day card I gave my Dad in 2001

• Notes to self

• An inspirational quote from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Amongst other things.

I mention this because with all the ‘how-to’s’ of meaning in the media, it might be easy to lose one simple truth.

We live in a world rich with meaning.

Creating and interpreting meaning in your life is something you can influence, here and now.

To Search For Meaning?

There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning.

Anaïs Nin, French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer.

Years ago, I thought I could find big M meaning by searching for it.

Perhaps I’d find it doing a pilgrimage? Nope. I traversed those paths but the epiphany never came.

Maybe it was accrued through surviving difficult times, like a reward for endurance? No. I didn’t find it there either.

I did not know then what psychologist and researcher Laura King reports, that searching for meaning is negatively related to the experience of meaning.

This was something that Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist, professor, author and Holocaust survivor intrinsically knew, as he found meaning within his control “in spite of everything.”

“… life always offers us a possibility for the fulfilment of meaning … our … existence can be made meaningful … as long as we have breath … we are each responsible for answering life’s questions.” 

Yes to Life – by Viktor Frankl (p.47)

Why Meaning Is Better Small

Meaningfulness happens within living rather than outside of it … start … by investigating those experiences of meaningfulness that are already part of your life.

Frank Martela, Philosopher and researcher.

Once I stopped searching and started paying attention, I found small ‘m’ meaning by focusing on the meaning around me, every day, moment by moment.

I found it in the warm familiarity of my desk space, in appreciating the changes in my garden from season to season, in the small actions I take daily towards my big goals, in the joy I feel when kookaburras laugh on the morning walk, and in the pleasure of cooking a tasty meal for those I love.

Those big goals? As the renowned meaning researcher Michael F. Steger suggests, it is important to ground big M meaning in daily small m moments, or we may live life in the abstract.

The Rhythm of Meaning-Making

Most people flourish more when their worlds are rich in tangible, everyday meaning.

Michael F. Steger, 2022.

With meaning all around us, we can start to access small m meaning when we recognise meaning in daily moments.

Michael Steger describes the process like a rhythmic tide that ebbs and flows. Once we identify sources of meaning, whether a place, object, relationship or experience, we give meaning to and obtain meaning from them. What changes is that we now interact with these sources in a meaning-making way. We pay more attention in the moment, we acknowledge its value, and, in being enriched, we appreciate it even more.

This is meaning that makes life worth living. That makes our lives meaningful.

Solid, real, understandable, abundant small m meaning.

Fuel to promote healing and flourishing and on which to draw when life is not so rosy.

Now It’s Your Turn: Ignite Your Small m Meaning

Here is a contemplative exercise for you.

1. Choose a favourite or special place from your daily life, indoors or outdoors.

A place where:

> You enjoy spending time,

> That you use or regularly spend time in; and

> That feels highly familiar.

It should be:

> Concrete, not abstract;

> Somewhere you value, not simply enjoy.

It may be:

> At your desk,

> In your favourite room in your house,

> In a shed or garage,

> In a garden,

> On a track by the creek,

> Somewhere else – you choose.

2. What about this place makes it special? What about it gives you meaning?

3. How does this environment make sense to you? What specifically about it makes sense?

4. What do you get back from the place? What about it enriches, restores or comforts you? What exactly about the place encourages this feeling?

5. Take a photo of the place, if you haven’t already. How does the photo ‘capture’ the place's value and meaning for you?

6. What, if anything, has this exercise highlighted for you about the meaning of your special place?

Stretch Target

Using the same questions, now do the exercise thinking of a special relationship.