Searching for meaning is exhausting and confusing. Lately, I prefer immersing myself in the superficial. I love to party and drink too much and wake up the next evening to do it all over again. I’d rather find myself contemplating whether I want green or blue or pink to be the dominant color of my eye make-up instead of contemplating how I’m going to make my life matter or even if I can make it matter considering that past serious contemplations have led me to believe that there is no afterlife.
I want to believe that each individual gives meaning to her own life; that there really is no greater meaning, no greater power than our individual minds. Spending an hour or two painting my face should be just as meaningful as eating an incredible piece of chocolate cake with a glass of wine or writing a story or reading a poem written hundreds of years ago. But it’s not. All things are not equal. At the end of the night, when I come home and my drunken buzz transforms to exhaustion and my make-up is smeared and my hair is tangled, I know I will lie in my bed and feel empty.
I guess the truth is that meaning is painful much of the time. Currently, for me, it is more painful than it is anything else. It requires a level of self-reflection my battered heart does not want to deal with now. So, I suffocate it in layers of foundation and shimmering colors and drown in it cheap and not-so-cheap beers, wines, tequilas, rums and vodkas. I drown out the noise of my own suffering with beats from Lil John and focus on shaking it and dropping it down low.
And I try to convince myself that these things are just as meaningful in their own way until I encounter something that destroys that fantasy. “Taking a Minute” by K’naan is so densely packed with emotions that I can find no logic to try to give “In Da Club” by 50 Cent the same credit. David Sedaris does not compare to John Irving, nor does Pride and Prejudice compare to Wuthering Heights.
The need for varying levels of meaning must be an indication that we all get tired. The superficial must require less energy than the genuine. Not even the mystics can remain in a constant state of supposed divine union. (I don’t see how they can really be experiencing a union with a being that in all likelihood does not exist, but to each their own.) But, still, why do I feel the need for meaning? Why do I feel something is missing without it?