Worlds of Meaning

"Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself  forms a world."

This is perhaps my favorite line in Albert Camus's essay on the myth of Sisyphus. Can a man condemned by the gods to forever roll a rock up a hill and watch it roll down, only to roll it up again, find meaning in such a repetitive, trivial task? Is there meaning? And we, in a way, are doing that exact same thing: living our repetitive, robotic lives, doing things over and over again, and finally dying. Is there meaning?

No. There isn't. That is, if you look at our existence from that angle. If we look at ourselves on a universal scale, it is true- we have no meaning. We're just a speck of dust in an infinite universe, a planet taking its place among the cosmos, and the creatures upon it unable to have even the slightest ripple of impact on the rest of the universe. But let's zoom in a little closer. Let's look at it from a worldly view. Now, we see some meaning- to impact the world. But that's very broad, and very difficult to do. Only a select few are remembered this way. Let's zoom in closer, to the national view. More names are there, and many more people have impacted this country. And zooming in closer, we see than many more have impacted communities. Finally, zooming into the spheres of peoples' personal lives, we see that there is an uncountable of impact people have had on other people.

We are concerned with a great deal of things every day. But like Sisyphus, we are living in the moment, in the only world we know- our own. Each person I see flooding the hallways has their own world- their own interests, plans, and friends. Here, we are meaningful.

Now the question of what is meaningful is not very difficult to answer. In our worlds, the only meaning we have is the meaning we can have. That is, whatever we can do to have meaning- that's what it is. Making an impact. That's what we can do. We may not be able to change the world, not the country, not even the community. But we can make impacts on our worlds, our lives- and the lives of others.

The stone, the mountain, the night- that is Sisyphus's world. And, knowing only his world, he can find momentary happiness. He can feel joy and meaning in what he's able to do. He may be meaningless in the larger picture. But he is meaningful when he is in his world.

As are we.