The meaning of relationships!
To be healthy, functioning people, we need to feel good about ourselves. We need to feel that our time and energy is spent in meaningful ways. Meaning nourishes us. When we run out of meaning, everything else slows and stops. We get depressed.
We generate meaning primarily through relationships. The most meaningful tend to be relationships with other people, but we also have relationships with our inner selves, our career, our community and religious, political or other groups with which we identify, as well as with ideas and activities we engage in. Any or all of these relationships can give our lives meaning and, therefore, make us feel good about ourselves.
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Meaning revisited!
I have just finished a 50-hour series entitled Awakening From The Meaning Crisis* created by John Vervaeke, an assistant Professor at Toronto University. The first half is about how we got to where we are today from a historical perspective and the second half is about what we can do to rebuild meaning into our collective lives.
He proposes that the maladaptive responses we see to the meaning crisis range from ‘pure suicide’ through depressive suicide and the mental health crisis, loneliness, addiction …
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Be wise!
Up until about the 13th century people in Europe would read for the purpose of self-transformation. They would generally recite a text – speak it aloud – and usually in the presence of other people (who may not have been able to read themselves). The same text could be read over and over, each reading stimulating further change. This practice was formalised as ‘lectio divina’ with several steps leading to changes in behaviour.
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Just engage!
In my recent book Why We Teach I share research that shows about 60% of teachers – and about the same proportion of employees in other sectors and countries – are disengaged from their work. In short, their work has little meaning for them.
I also show that by curbing autonomy in young people through the use of reward and punishment – in schools especially - we create young people with two mind states (red brain and blue brain), how these interplay determines their levels of engagement or disengagement in later life.
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