Selflessness: Finding Meaning Amidst a Winter Blue

Finding the tedium of school and the seemingly endless cycle of study, eat, study, sleep, study — oppressive? Winter is a difficult time for most people on school campus. Dig down underneath the snow of your routine and you’ll find the remedy — selflessness.

Fr. Clayton Thompson hits the mark. “Often times, however, the desire to find meaning can be an ironic, double-edged sword: searching for that purpose can lead to an unhealthy, exclusive focus on ourselves. The desire for meaning can be nothing more than the selfish desire not to have to suffer or experience the agony of uncertainty and insecurity in a developing life.”

He goes on to add, “The consequence: we get ever more caught up in our own concerns, never seeing that perhaps the experience of feeling that life is meaningless is – ironically – a result of being too centered on ourselves and on the desire to “find ourselves” and the purpose of our existence. We allow the feeling of meaninglessness to paralyze us, refusing to act until the exact direction and purpose of those actions has become fully clear to our minds. The end product: a society of people waiting to live and refusing to take the risk.”

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Professor Peter Kreeft adds another dimension, that of the importance of leisure in seeing the truth, goodness, and beauty that surrounds us.

“Truth, goodness, and beauty. You just do it… We have more and more slaves that we have to take care of. And therefore we have less and less time every generation. Less and less leisure…

Our slaves are not made of flesh and blood anymore, thank God, but they’re made of steel and plastic and computer chips…

We are happiest when we play with endlessly fascinating simple things, like the sea. Or, sticks and stones. instead of with expensive computer games which bore us so quickly that we require new ones every month…

This is an image of the human condition.”