Slow Down for Reflection: Letting Yourself Find the Deeper Meaning in Life

There's a natural feeling I get when I begin to become overwhelmed by events in my life. I tend to slow down and to reflect about what it all means. I've learned that it helps me to cope when I do this, and it gives me a better perspective than what I could otherwise come by.

So, when I get the time, I slow down and think about what got me to where I am. In life, one thing leads to another. I find that when I stop and think things over, I have a better chance of understanding how I am being influenced. If I don't stop and sort things out a little, it is almost impossible to figure out what is happening around me.

Stuck Inside a Series of Appointments

If you're like me, you tend to fall into a rut of living from one event to the next. It seems like life is a series of appointments. You can sit down and think of what you're going to do next, or what you did yesterday, or what you are busy doing now, but it all doesn't make sense. It's just a series of often unrelated events, each just about as important or unimportant as the next. What is the purpose of it all?

Over time, it becomes very hard to see the purpose in life if you do not pause to reflect over events of the day. When I reflect, I look at something a new way, and a part of me is changed as a result of the process. Not only do I seem to get a clearer idea of how I feel in my heart, but I also begin to identify with what's going on in other peoples' lives -- to empathize with them, and I finally even draw a conclusion from it all which influences the way I will decide to behave.

Choosing to Retrain a Trained Response

Let me supply you with a random example. When I watch sports clips, something I sometimes see is an angry white-haired coach all keyed up during a game -- maybe even throwing a chair around -- pretty much acting like a 3-year old child. There are different ways for me to react to a sports clip like this. One way is to consider the guy a jerk -- nothing more and nothing less. Another way is to feel like this guy is representative of what all coaches in sports have degenerated to, and that there's nothing that can be done about it. Another way is to agree with him, and to see him as a no-nonsense leader who keeps his team under his thumb. Whichever way I decide to feel, what matters is that if I'm even mildly alert when I'm watching one of these sports clips, I'm bound to feel something.

However, it's clear when we think about it that a person can choose to respond the way they want to respond. It's important that we realize that we often respond and feel only the way we've been trained to respond and feel. This often leads to frustration, as in the story of the kid who kicks the cat because his mother just yelled at him, and his mother just yelled at him because his father had told her she needed to do a better job of cleaning the house, and his father had told her she needed to do a better job of cleaning the house because his boss had told him that he was going to have to fire someone in his department tomorrow. One thing is responsible for another, and the stress that a dad can feel in a competitive workplace can easily end up being carried over to an innocent cat. We have to be very careful, because how we're feeling might just be how we've been trained to feel through cause and effect.

Making a Change in the Routine

So, how do we change this routine, so that we don't end up kicking a defenseless little cat? The answer is that we begin to reflect.

Getting back to the coach, how could I reflect about his actions so that I could end up having a healthier perspective on my own life, rather than either a more cynical or a more inconsiderate view of the world? First, it seems important that I should see in his behavior something that is not uncommon to my own way of living. Sometimes, we all feel a sense of rage like these coaches do. We may not throw a chair or chew anyone out, but we still probably act stubborn or self-centered every once in a while even if we don't do it out loud and in front of the public. So, when I think about how alike we are, I realize that there may be something I can learn by taking a look at how this man is acting. Is a position of power valuable just so that you can yell at others and act like a child? I don't think that's why these guys get in these jobs to begin with, it just ends up like this. So, I can be certain that there were many better reasons why he wanted to be a coach. But instead of remembering those, he just throws a tantrum.

Life is very short. The unfortunate truth is that a guy like this only has a few more years to live. Aren't there better ways to spend your life than by being a self-centered ball of anger that most people are going to ignore anyway?

Asking the Same Question

You and I should ask ourselves, in all honesty, the same question. What, after all, is it that we're doing that is meaningful?

Deep in my heart, I believe that there is huge significance to a human life, and meaning is always gushing from the very pores of our skin. However, if we do not give ourselves time to reflect on this meaning that exists in our lives, we hardly remember that it even exists -- and our days and nights begin to feel very meaningless. It's sort of like the life of a zombie.

A Deathbead Looking Backwards

I beleive that a life should be lived from the perspective of a deathbead, looking backwards. When someone is on their deathbed, they often regret the little things they didn't do in life, often the little simple things, like, "I should have tried out for that play, or I should have held onto that pension plan, or I should have tried to work things out with my spouse before we got divorced." There is no reason not to do the little things today, while the time is right, before we reach the deathbed.

Seeing Meaning

So, reflecting on events now and then, especially when things get crazy, helps us out of all kinds of jams. When we look at what's happening with other people, we can always choose to try to see things from their point of view. And we can draw conclusions from what we see that will help us to improve the quality of our own lives.

The process of reflection, identifying with others, and drawing conclusions which will influence our actions allows us to have an easier time of seeing how meaningful life can be.