[Marianne]

Hi Drewie,

Your story pulls at my heartstrings–finding meaning to things including the big question of as to life itself seems so often to perplex so many of us humans (!) and after all this time in all these centuries it might seem as if we would have found out by now. To me, my “objective” of finding meaning is often replaced with the idea of Jung’s synchronicity theory; when things happen that tempt me to desire to decipher them for meaning I instead recall Jung’s notion of synchronicity–it helps me feel more “relaxed or calm” about my desire to know. Probably, most people reading this have heard of synchronicity, but I did look online really quickly for a decent definition and found a write up on the original Jungian publication and then the definition below:

Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, by C.G. Jung, is a book published by Princeton University Press in 1960. It was extracted from Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche, which is volume 8 in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. The book was also published in 1985 by Routledge. (It was originally published in 1952.)

And here is a link to an article on a website–I like how it begins:

Carl Jung on Synchronicity

And then again, one of my favorite quotes of Campbell’s is,

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

But still, I would love to know the meaning of the big questions and meaning of life! But I like what you say  about” just being able to experience the wonder of life.

Thank you for expressing your experiences with these questions and with the wonder of life and the wondering!

~ Marianne