Your Life Has No Meaning and How To Get Over the Winter Blues?
Posted by Wendy Jacobs in Jul, 2016
Your Life has NO meaning, yep ITS TRUE. NO MEANING AT ALL…..EXCEPT FOR THE MEANING YOU GIVE IT.
This was the greatest realisation of my life, the day I discovered that my life had no meaning, except for the one I chose to give it.
See life is a Rorschach and for those of you that don’t know the Rorschach is, it is a popular psychological test also known as the INKBLOT test, used to determine a patient’s emotional and psychological well-being. Psychologists present the inkblots to patients and found they had different interpretations of what they saw. Psychologists further determined that these interpretations can give great insight into a patient’s emotional and psychological well-being.
Well it’s the same in life, life is the inkblot.
We are presented each day with hundreds and thousands of situations (inkblots).which can be interpreted many different ways. Interpretations that will either bring you more peace, love, joy and happiness or interpretations that bring pain suffering, depression anger, or any other negative emotion, you get the picture.
We are always interpreting or more easily said we are always giving meaning to what we see and what we are experiencing, and this meaning that we are choosing, yes choosing can either bring us more love, joy and happiness or more pain and suffering.
Either way the choice yours and you make them every day, mostly unconsciously.
Let me explain with this example:
Many people suffer from this thing called SAD (seasonal effective disorder). A depressive disorder that is affected by the season, I used to get depressed in the winter too. Then I discovered something , no wonder I was depressed , I was continually going around saying things like “winter is depressing, it’s cold, it’s isolating, its lonely, its dark” It was the meaning I was giving winter, that was having me feeling depressed it was not winter. Winter is what it is, and I knew people who loved it!! I mean really loved it!! So what was the difference between them and me? These people who loved winter would say things like, “I love winter”, “winter is such a romantic season”, “I love staying indoors and listening to the rain and the wind”.
Let’s go a step further here because it is not the cold, the rain, or the wind but the meaning we give those things that give us an emotional experience. See for one person listening to the rain is peaceful for another it’s depressing. To one person staying indoors means more quality time with the family, more love and connection to another it means not going out connecting with friends, it means loneliness. To one person staying indoors means an opportunity to catch up on reading and learning or watching their favorite TV series and again it is not these things but what they mean to you that will give you the emotional experience of winter. Reading for some people may mean an opportunity to learn something new and be inspired, to another reading is boring. Staying indoors for one person means more time to watch their favorite TV series and relax to another person watching a TV series is mind numbing. The crazy thing here is that all meaning is made up, and we can choose to give the same experience many different meanings. I like to share this example, sitting at a coffee shop one day a man walked passed with the biggest bunch of roses I had ever seen. “Wow!” , I thought, “ how romantic”, my friend who I was with described this same bunch of roses as a complete waste of money and the lady sitting at the table beside us, joked about how this man was obviously feeling guilty about something. Now this was interesting, one man, one bunch of roses and three very different emotional responses which can all be traced back to the meaning each of us CHOSE to describe what we had just seen.
This is so interesting to me and I hope you are starting to see how it is the MEANING you give something that is having feel what you do, not the thing itself, see life is an inkblot. The meaning you give your life, your life situations and your life circumstances will give you some insight into how you are influencing your emotional well- being, your emotions are not some random thing happening to you. You influence them by what you are doing and meaning is just one of the things we all do every day of our lives which influence our emotions.
The meaning you CHOOSE becomes your emotional experience. If you say something is depressing, then it will be for you. If you say it is romantic, then it is, if you say it makes you angry then it will. It is the words you use to describe your life situation that gives meaning to it, and it is these meanings that give you emotional experiences in life, and sadly all this is often done unconsciously.
So do you love winter? Why do you feel this way? Investigate the meanings you have given this season because it is the words YOU use to describe winter that is having you feel this way.
Whatever meaning you have decided to give winter, doesn’t affect winter it affects YOU.
Winter is what it is, and life is what it is.
It is the meanings we choose to give the seasons of our life that will determine whether we experience more love, joy, peace and happiness or more sadness, depression, anger or anxiety, either way we are always choosing.
So discipline your mind to focus on what is good about the situation and be conscious of your decisions because you are always choosing. The question is are your decisions taking you closer to an AMAZING life or further away?
Life has many seasons and they come and go and come and go, and the quality of your life will be massively impacted by your decisions, by what you choose things MEAN to you. You have been given a massive gift the gift of choice and it is up to you how you use it.
See life has no meaning, no meaning at all except for the one you choose to give it. So choose well and make your life AMAZING there is beauty, love and joy everywhere if you choose to see it.
As always may your lives be conscious and filled with love.
XXX