Insight #291:
Are you still hoping to make this year more meaningful? Well, stop hoping and pay attention. I know the secret to meaning and here it is:
Relationships. There can be no meaning without relationship.
Objects on their own and in isolation have no meaning. It is the relationship between the objects that creates meaning. For example, the gadgets you own have no meaning. They just lie there taking up space, gathering dust. Until you use them. Until you relate to them.
Objects only make sense to us through our interaction with them. When we engage with them. The same with life.
Life only makes sense to us through our relationships. Our relationships to anything and everything. However, it is our relationship with people that really matters. Because we don’t simply relate to people; we interact with people. As Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist, once explained, “We need other people to be truly ourselves.”
Interacting with your gadgets or your social media pages just won’t do. Neither will email, nor instant messaging. So stop allowing apps, tools and toys to isolate you from real, live people.
Get out there and relate. In person. That’s how you make a more meaningful year.
Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.
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Where did I get the idea for this piece? John Fowles. In his book, The Magus, he wrote: “That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women – and absurd.”
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