Words with Friends

"The most common mistake that most of us make when it comes to finding meaning in life is that we think big.  We wait and hope for a transformational moment to shake us up and change the way we live, such as a near-death experience that suddenly reorganizes our priorities.  But that's just one way to develop meaning in our lives.  There's another, more powerful way--by focusing on the small things in life." (Ori Brafman, Succeeding When You're Supposed to Fail, page 78).

To make our moments and days more meaningful, we can:

1. Divide our activities into smaller tasks and focus on the impact, purpose and meaning of each moment and each accomplishment;
2. Focus more on the questions than on the answers--let the thrill of the chase be the real source of meaning and purpose;
3. Make sure that we share our journeys with people who engage with us in the pursuit of meaning and purpose.

The third item is the focus of this post.  Brafman describes an experiment with three groups of subjects.  One group received encouraging feedback after a task.  The second group received challenging feedback after a task.  The third group received no feedback.  Instead, the partners of the third group simply counter the number of times the test subjects uttered "th" as part of the conversation.  So the respondents were distracted and disengaged.

The group that found the exercise least meaningful was the group that was in it "alone."  Even challenging, contradictory and disagreeable feedback is preferable to speaking to an empty room. Having no one with which to share the joys and challenges of life is, for most of us, a bleak prospect at best.  Being for all intents and purposes ignored was the least meaningful condition.

It is true that apathy is the most painful of all responses.

I resonate deeply with this element of the pursuit of meaning.  I had become so accustomed to sharing the joy and challenges of life with a partner that when Anne died I couldn't conceive of life in another way.  I probably could have figured out some other path, but I didn't want to do that.  At the time I knew that I needed to get a "life" before I could go back to work.  And getting a life, for me, meant having someone with which to share the love, the life and the adventure.

It's as simple as playing "Words with Friends."  I don't much care to play such things by myself with others.  However, when I can serve as a personal consultant to my spouse, Brenda, as she plays seven games at once, I find the whole thing great fun.  It is the collaboration, the mutual problem-solving, the shared sense of triumph, the joint amazement at the creativity of the opponents.  Meaning that is shared is not additive.  I think it is logarithmic.

Antoine de St. Exuperay said that true love does not consist of gazing fondly into the eyes of another. It consists, rather, in looking in the same direction together.

I have a much deeper appreciation now of the sense of loss of those widowed.  I think about the decades of partnership for some of those couples.  I know the sense of amputation, of truncation, and of pointlessness I experienced.  John Gottman notes that allowing one's spouse to influence a person is one of the seven keys to marital success.  I suspect that is the case because such mutuality deepens the meaning of the things we do together.

I am not suggesting that only married people can have such a sense of shared meaning and adventure.  That's how it works out for me.  But meaning is both a personal and a communal enterprise.  By the way, I'm looking for a word...