Essay 36 - Hierarchies of Meaning

I have said repeatedly that you will find many things from which to derive meaning. And from those things you will derive different kinds of meaning. Some will be short term. Some will be long term. Some will be immediate, and some will grow over time. Some will be profoundly significant while others will be small blessings. And so on. But isn’t this vast array of sources of meaning confusing? And, if it is confusing, doesn’t it make it more difficult to make sense out of it? And, if it is difficult to make sense out of it, doesn’t that interfere with your feeling of meaning? The answer is yes, but not necessarily so.

I thought I would give some examples of things that I derive meaning from to show the wide range of things that are possible. For example, I used to have a little ritual where I would mow my lawn and then sit on my deck while enjoying how nice it all looks. Similarly, when I edged and weeded the garden and mulched it, I would sit on the deck and admire my work. I found this little ritual to be very meaningful. As I reflected on it one day, I realized that I had created beauty and order which are things I admired. Understanding this made the ritual more meaningful and I found other ways to create more beauty and more order. Having been a professor for two and a half decades, I wrote and delivered many lectures. I always sought to find beauty in ideas which I delivered in an orderly way to make them more comprehensible. So now I have two activities - yard work and teaching - each of which is meaningful at different levels and which I have linked together as a common search for beauty and order.

Cooking is also an example of beauty and order. The beauty is in the aesthetics of the finished product such as the flavor, texture, aroma, and presentation. The order is in the means by which you produced it which, hopefully, is reproducible.

I also enjoy literature, philosophy, and music. This fits with the others through beauty and order as well. Finally, this book of essays is further a pursuit of beauty in ideas and order in their presentation. As such, writing this book has been a profoundly meaningful experience and I hope that you have found something meaningful in it as well. The point here is that I found an organizing principle - beauty and order - which helped organize some of my meaningful experiences.

When you have a category or theme such as beauty and order, you can organize the things in the category into a hierarchy using some criteria such as most meaningful, duration of meaning, effort required, and so on. You can also organize your categories into a hierarchy based on an appropriate criterion. For example, I also find it meaningful to understand the origins of things. If I were to create a hierarchy which included beauty and order and the origins of things, I could organize them into a hierarchy using the same criteria mentioned above. Yes, I know you really need more than two things to make a hierarchy. But, I didn’t want the example to get too complicated. Hierarchies are a useful pattern for organizing things and they are useful for organizing meaningful experiences as well.

This essay is 574 words long and the audio is a little over 3 minutes.