“Meaninglessness is a blank canvas”

Andrew, one of the writers on Wise & Shine, wrote a magnificent small post recently, titled “The Horizons of Meaning.” It begins with the sentence “Meaninglessness is a blank canvas” and goes on to talk about how lack of meaning alienates while creativity allows us to embrace the world and draw richness from it.

Here’s Andrew’s post. It made me understand in a flash why some people I know are not happy. It’s because they’re not seeing the world like an artist, to use Andrew’s words, and they solely focus on finding solutions to problems. But first you have to work your way through the problem and all that entails in order to find a good solution. And working your way through a problem first requires an attitude check. You need to accept certain things and you need to accept that you need to work a lot with yourself rather than expect to quickly find solutions for things you perceive as obstacles. When everything becomes both work and play and life changes from knocking into walls/obstacles to a quest, everything gathers meaning.