Sleepwalking? Or Designing your Future

I happened to come across an article recently called “Sleepwalking + Designing for a Healthy Future.” It was an interview with the owners of a Hong Kong based company called Apogee. Apogee is a User Experience Design (UXD) & Usability consultancy. In the interview Dan and Jo, the owners, talk about making work more meaningful. In short, the article is about how so many people feel like they are sleepwalking through their working lives. They talk about “how hierarchies, and corporate jargon creates a soulless environment in which people don’t talk to or learn from each other, but only work at a relentless pace to meet targets.” They describe it as “people sleepwalking” and that those employees don't feel “connected to a meaningful story.”

I'm sure it doesn’t surprise anyone that such an environment is unhealthy. Apogee undertakes to re-create those stale and unhealthy working environments by creating what they call "sparkle". They don’t tell you in the article how they do it, though, so I can't give you that information :)

But this started me thinking about creating a meaningful life, and what a meaningful life is and whether meaningful can be linked to mindful? Can we make sparkle in our life by sitting in meditation? I think we can.

As usual, psychologists and philosophers don't see eye to eye on what constitutes a meaningful life. Philosopers can't even agree amongst themselves. The philosopher Nietzsche, for example, said the question of 'meaningful life' is meaningless because while we are in the middle of living, we can't tell whether our life is meaningful in the bigger context, and stepping outside our life to answer this question is impossible.

I tend to go with the modern psychology take, which says a meaningful life is when we feel connected: to others (family, friends, work, hobbies and quite often religion or faith). Or when we are connected to purpose. Or able to connect to our highest values. According to psychologists, finding that meaning(fulness) is a large component of our happiness.

Research also suggests that people who feel their lives are meaningless focus more on what is missing – and don’t understand what it is that matters. So in other words, many people who feel that their life lacks meaning - don’t actually know what a meaning is.

(see Landau, a philosophy professor at Haifa University in Israel and author of the 2017 book Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World)

So how does meaning connect to mindful? I sat with this question this past week, and these are the thoughts I came up with. But, as always, you take a look and see if this is what your experience is.

To put the whole concept in a nutshell: We create meaning when we are able to align our thoughts, beliefs and emotions with our actions, helping us to connect.

I believe our mindfulness practice can help make connections easier.

Meaning can be a different idea for everyone. Some people may find meaning in momentous events, while others find meaning in the mundane, everyday happenings.

Through my own meditation practice, I know that we all have what we need to create these connections and we have what it takes to create meaning. And I do believe our mindfulness practice can help make connections easier; whether it's connecting to people, connecting to happiness or connecting to meaning itself.

Why and how? Firstly because we are used to the idea of looking – and sitting wit this concept of meaningful, I found meaning has a lot to do with looking closely at what we think meaning is and what is meaningful to us.

Finding meaning is also more about 'we' than it is about only 'me'. We know how it feels to connect to other people in an authentic way because we practice metta / loving-kindness meditation.

When I read the phrase "connecting to purpose and our highest values', I really had to sit with that for a while, because that sounded so much like jargon to me, and I didn't want to sleepwalk through this practice. :) While I understood it intellectually, I couldn't really get a feeling for that right away. But I realised this is already also part of our practice. It's what we call 'setting intentions' in meditation. In yoga we call it 'sankalpa'. In sanskrit sankalpa means "great resolve or determination; a vow" The root word 'san' means “become one with” and the root word 'kalpa' means 'proper fit' or 'formation / creation'. Sankalpa or setting intention gives us the opportunity to connect us with who we really are: our thoughts, our values, our core. It guides us to live the life we are meant to live.

Are our intentions or the thoughts we have really that important? Because we tend to think that thoughts don't count for much; only what we do really matters. The short answer is 'Yes'. It really does matter what we think. Our thoughts, along with what we say and how we act, creates our karma. It creates or designs our own future.

Ghandi said:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.”

Have a wonderful week.

Metta

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