Blowing on Embers: Reigniting the Instinct for Meaning

There’s a funny adage that those of us who work in hospice often chuckle about: if you’re ever at a cocktail party, and you don’t like who you’re talking to, you can just tell them what you do for a living. That usually sends people packing.

I’ve never used this tactic myself, but it makes me laugh nonetheless, knowing that, in many cases, it would definitely work! In addition to working with clients through Deep Ocean Spiritual Counseling, I work as a hospice chaplain. Whenever I share this fact with people, they often say something like, “Oh, I could never!” or “How depressing!” or “I just think it would be so morbid!” People assume that being around death and dying all the time would be deadening to their spirit, if not objectively terrifying.

For me, working in hospice is anything but depressing and deadening. It’s quite enlivening, actually. Though I get sad sometimes and grieve my clients’ losses along with them, its a loving sadness that deepens the spirit, not one that deadens or destroys it. Most of the time, this sadness is cradled in a larger container of joy — one that experiences the Great Round of life-death-life with much awe, meaning, and reverence. It is a sadness that finds relief and liberation, and a sadness that always seems to leave a generous trail of wisdom in its stead.

However, there is something about hospice that can be challenging to see again and again — and it has nothing to do with the physical realities of bodily death or the energy of grieving loved ones. What can be challenging is seeing how predictably, successfully, and pervertedly our culture has steered people away from an inner, reflective life, and witnessing the sense of meaninglessness and despair the dying can feel as a result.

Implicitly and explicitly, our culture emphasizes extroverted forms of satisfaction: messaging that contentment resides somewhere “out there.” You’ll be happy when you get the “right” career; have a family; engage in travel; buy a house; are physically fit; etc., etc. It’s not that these things aren’t meaningful (they absolutely can be), but they’re often not available to us in the same ways at the end of life. The body slows down and the usual “outer” activities become hard. Even socializing and “finding words” can be a challenge. Meanwhile, our culture isn’t so great about helping people explore the power of the inner world, and many don’t know how satisfying, meaningful, and profound introspection can be. Truth be told, I’ve often thought this “outer world” bias is responsible for our rampant consumerism in the United States: having shadowed and become unconscious to the value within, we project our value outwardly and subsequently try to buy it.

I have seen how privileging outer activities over inner examination for an entire lifetime can sometimes result in a person disbelieving they have an inner world at all. When this is the case, the end of life becomes a meaningless series of corporal losses, with very little richness. The question “how do you want to relate to your dying?” is often met with surprise or confusion, as if our interior attitudes, reflections, and capacity for meaning were sheer legend. This, for me, is the harder part of hospice work: the culturally conditioned tendency to shrink ourselves to the size of our external lives alone.

I always found it very hopeful and intriguing that Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung theorized that reflection was one of the five human instincts (along with hunger, sexuality, change/movement, and creative endeavors). For Jung, instincts are involuntary drives towards certain activities - and these drives just come with being human. We can’t willfully eradicate them. Instead, we are called to honor them and make them increasingly conscious.

By describing “reflection” as an instinct, Jung was pointing to our innate human capacity for self-awareness, introspection, and meaning-making. Cataloging reflection and meaning-making as instinctive is hopeful because it means that no matter how meaningless things feel from directing our attention too much outwardly, the drive to draw attention inwards, to reflect, and to make meaning is ever-present, like an inextinguishable ember inside of us, primed to ignite into consciousness. Ignoring this instinct can sometimes lead to depression or feelings of numbness, but rediscovering and deepening it can illuminate a newfound aliveness, even when we’re dying.

The question becomes: how does our inner life go from an ember to a roaring fire? What stokes the flames of meaningfulness?

My humble experience is that it starts with stillness. Literally: it requires us doing and moving less. For some who are aging and dying, this happens automatically, but for many of us: this requires discipline. Phones must be put away; invitations declined; TVs turned off: not because there’s anything morally wrong with directing our attention towards others or worldly happenings, but because accessing the instinct of reflection and making its operations conscious requires the space, silence, and stillness to honestly observe and experience ourselves. With practice, we might need less and less stillness and silence to do this but, at least initially, most people find that being able to notice feelings, thoughts, and sensations — or being able to contemplate dreams and longings — or being able to dwell in the deeper recesses of being — all of that necessitates turning down the volume of what habitually distracts us.

Having prepared the ground for introspection, we can play with what we are drawn to. Meditation, journaling, dream-work, contemplation, prayer; calligraphy; quiet, outdoor observation; artwork: all of these can provide the kindling and air we need to stoke the flames of a vibrant inner life. With clients at Deep Ocean Spiritual Counseling, part of our work is often discovering what medium naturally harmonizes us with the inner world, and in what way we can use that practice to go deeper.

None of this means that feelings of meaninglessness are some kind of spiritual failure. Experiencing meaninglessness is part of the human experience. In fact, some of the wisest people I know are those that have experienced long stretches of meaninglessness and who made friends with the existential despair that arose as a result. Actually, I believe when we experience meaninglessness, we’re tapping into a partial truth. Reality doesn’t inherently mean any one particular thing. Instead, it’s wide open, full of possibilities. The whole reason our lives can be meaningful at all is because there is freedom, openness, and no single, insoluble meaning. So when we’re feeling meaninglessness, it might be because we’re intuiting the vast, open canvas upon which artful meaning-making can occur — and that vastness can terrify us.

The sadness I feel is not when people experience meaninglessness that is part and parcel of existential freedom, but when they experience meaninglessness from unconsciously closing the door to the inner world due to collective, extroverted conditioning. This, we can have compassion for and can relate to with gentleness and curiosity.

Moreover, we don’t need to wait until we’re dying to discover the oceanic depths and richness of our inner world. The ember of reflection is instinctive and lit. Right here, right now: you are having an experience in this lifetime that is unique, important, and profound. What is it? What does it mean to be you? What does it mean to be alive?

So go ahead: be still; grab the kindling of introspection; blow on your inner embers — for I so love when your fire roars.