journey to meaning…
October 25th, 2006 by jhunitz
who am i? what am i here for? where am i bound to go? these questions had bugged me even before the tempting schools of thoughts that the academe has to offer found their way into my existence.
as a child i would gaze at the sky with its overwhelming darkness of which its oblivious mystery had never seemed to be threatening to me (for it is this same darkness that allows me to see the brightness of the stars).i have spent almost every night of my childhood years looking up into the heavens trying to figure out where does space begin…where does it end?
as a child, i was physically weak that i almost died of bronchopneumonia when i was barely a week old.though i’ve never heard my parents complaining about my condition i have asked my self and God…what am i here for?Watching the stars in the vagueness of the skies made me wonder,does my existence count?why can’t i just die and have my life be given to someone who could live it out in ways much better than i can.
with that grain of idea in mind i had lived my early childhood years in a divided existence..half of it, living to please the people around me..the other, living to fill the space inside me.but no matter what i did,even if people would affirm anything i do i still couldn’t fill the void inside of me.what do i really want?what am i here for?a child’s life seems to be so simple and yet to me it was just as complex as the origin of space.i couldn’t find the reason of my existence as i couldn’t figure out where do the ends of space meet…
i was five years old when i started to answer my own questions..with the realization that i am not alone in the quest for meaning as i have read in the books of my mom (she did not send me to pre-school but selflessly accepted the toiling responsibility of being my first teacher and taught me how to read at barely 4 years old).then…’i want to touch lives’, i have declared.
but life has its own twists and turns..there came a time when i have felt like i’m nothing but a crap.that there’s no way i could possibly touch lives for i couldn’t even touch my own.i have wished for death again.’the world is as helpless as i am,’ i would say, ‘there’s nothing i could do for it.’
i lived life trying to evade and deny that the void inside is slowly engulfing me..corrupting my whole existence.the space in me has turned into a blackhole with every single moment…attracting what is out there into its core..into its core where everything turns into nothing.
while in the university my life has turned into nothing but meaningless existence..i had lost hold of my strings and my psyche just couldn’t find my way back into my body.i was a soul torn apart by the meaningless struggle for meaning.i felt ashame for the fact that i am a psychology major and a pathetic lover of philosophy yet couldn’t comprehend what’s goin’ on with my life.i have wasted life far worse than a drunkard or a gambler could. i have the answers, but whose answers do i’ve got? they were according of Freud, Erikson, Horney, Maslow, William James, Ellis, Murray, Viktor Frankl, Sartre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Soren Kierkegaard…but i was yet to find my own voice….
i grew tired..i just let go of everything..my search for meaning,the questions i have never answered…i just woke up one morning talking heart-to-heart with God asking Him to lead the way…i have realized i’ve been trying to find my way into the wild on my own. though i have constantly seek His help in my prayers (which seemed to be a checklist of needs) i have never placed my full trust in Him after all.for quite a while i have lived exclusively in the new world i’ve found..just me and my Savior but i just couldn’t keep within the LIGHT He poured into my life..it radiates from me to the world i exist.then i found the meaning that i’ve long been searching for…
what then is the meaning of my existence? i have realized that it is right before me all through the years—to live each moment savoring the beauty of God’s gifts and to share everything He has given me…including the pains and the srtuggles that would inspire people to go on for they are not alone…
have you found what you have been looking for?
