Читать книгу Meaningful Living Across the Lifespan - Moses N. Ikiugu - Страница 28

There are some apparently contradictory perspectives in this discussion. A Taoist view of meaning contains meaninglessness, not as indifference to reality, but as acceptance of it. A Western perspective might generally be that: ‘A meaningful life…is a life of active engagement in projects of worth, which might involve such things as moral or intellectual accomplishments, relationships with family and friends, or artistic/creative enterprises’ (Paul et al., 1997, p. xii). Meaning can also be defined as an experience of coherence, as well as a sense of creativity and control over the span of one’s life (Carlson, Clark, & Young, 1998). Dwyer, Nordenfelt, and Ternestedt (2008, p. 98) offer a particularly relevant definition of the construct thus: ‘Meaning is understood here in general sense of one’s self and one’s life having a value, within a focus on everyday life.’ Human society is based on co-operation and participation, which suggests a perception of and need for shared values. The core theme of this book is that individuals need to live meaningfully through what they do in the pursuit of daily occupations, and suggests a common sense approach to a working definition of meaningfulness, based in tacit knowledge and derived from experience.

As De Certeau (1988) found in his exploration of the practice of everyday life, things which are close at hand are meaningful because they are immediately useful. The way in which people associate with others in the community in which they live is through a common knowledge of where to get a decent cut of meat, or a meeting at their preferred café which they get to through a short cut through the streets which they know of, and at which they might discuss how to get a new job, or where they can have their car fixed. These are examples of how people get by in work or life in general. The commonsense understanding of meaningfulness lies in this sense of connectedness with other people and with one’s context, and is realized through a mosaic of the mundane.

The paradox of the objective/subjective definition of meaning is apparent in the key skill of establishing rapport with clients in the client centered approach to therapy. The therapist has to listen carefully to the client. Even where the client has difficulty in engaging, the therapist has to provide an opportunity for him/her to communicate (du Toit, 2009). Despite the expertise of the therapist, the will to act rests with the client. The client’s lived experience qualifies him/her to challenge the therapist’s knowledge, however objective that knowledge might be in the perspective of the therapist (Sinclair, 2007). To appreciate and come to terms with the kind of knowledge such lived experience may reveal, therapists may have to prepare, just as they would when they study in order to expand their clinical and theoretical knowledge, by developing their awareness of and accepting other perspectives of meaningfulness. This entails being aware of the subjectivities which have been absorbed through the process of becoming a therapist, or the culture and society in which one grew up. These subjective contexts provide individuals with ideological definitions of meaning that exclude recognition of the experiences of other people. For example, even in occupational therapy education, Beagan (2007) found that working class occupational therapy students tended not to discuss personal experiences in class because the dominant middle class milieu of the university made them feel insignificant. They thought that what they said would simply not be heard, an indication that they were made to feel that their lives were not as meaningful as those of their more privileged classmates.

As healthcare workers, occupational therapists often deal with problems that arise from social and economic disparities and their consequences on health. The knowledge that professionals use is often learned as a set of technical interventions. These are often presented as specialized forms of knowledge, applied in clinical settings; whereas the conditions being treated are experienced quite differently by the people who are being treated (Frank, 1995; Mattingly, 1998). The experiences of anxiety, discomfort, pain, disability, the disruption of life narratives, and the social narratives which clients have, can be explained to but not always shared experientially with the therapist. The life trajectory of the therapist may often be different from that of the client in many respects, and each may experience subjective differences in the definition of meaning and what is meaningful.

In this chapter we have very broadly discussed various perspectives of meaningfulness. Our concern remains to explore how daily occupational life may be used to enhance meaning in peoples’ lives. One of the things that we want to emphasize though, because there often is a misunderstanding, is that meaning should not be confused with happiness. As Belliotti (2001, p. 129) stated: ‘Meaningful lives…are not necessarily happy lives’. Frankl (1992) certainly understood this because he experienced persecution and many losses but came to recognize that painful events may be meaningful. Many people who choose to relate their experiences in writing describe periods of pain and struggle. African National Congress leaders Alfred Luthuli (1963) and Nelson Mandela (1994) and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (2000) are examples. Like many of the worker writers whose lives are explored in the next chapter, the meaningfulness they appear to have experienced did not preclude moments of unbearable pain and unhappiness.

Thus, it is difficult to know for sure how happy individuals who have lived meaningful lives were. Readers can only project their experiences empathically onto them in the form of thinking ‘I would be happy, or unhappy, if I was in their circumstances’. Despite the difficulties they endured, including imprisonment, physical violence, loss of loved ones and friends, and threats to their lives, none of the people listed in the above examples lived their entire lives in distress. King (2000) certainly understood himself to have a destiny to fulfill and seemed to have faced the possibility of assassination with equanimity. What we want to underscore, as stated earlier, is that a meaningful life is not necessarily a happy one, since meaning and happiness are not inextricably linked, although, ‘…happy lives, at least those that are not artificially induced, are invariably meaningful’ (Belliotti, 2001, p. 129). In other words, meaningfulness does not equate with happiness, but happiness always subsumes meaningfulness.