Life is a connundrum. That’s all life is. An endless maze of choices and conflicts and the ensuing confusion, and the occasional contenment. Life also goes on. It doesn’t stop. Does the earth stop rotating?
Normally life can be meaningless but sometimes, just a window of meaning opens up. Like a limited period offer, never to return. A stock clearance sale for books that will never be reprinted again. It’s at that moment when you must ditch everything that you are doing and jump in.
There are two reasons why we don’t make the most of these opportunities. One we don’t see them. The window doesn’t open up to a bright shiny morning. Instead it appears as an old tarnished vessel which needs to be polished, but is so easy to overlook among the other shiny objects. Just like the lamp of Alladin. Very much like the story of The Alchemist. Secondly, it is difficult to ditch everything and jump in. The latter is what makes life the hardest. Giving up and letting go. The kind of courage you need to make the payoffs is hard to gather.
So how does one find meaning? For some folks, they find meaning in the present. They make meaning of things, people and experiences. To them meaning comes in waves, as an oscillation between the continuum of meaningful and the mundane. It is not an event, but an ongoing journey of discovery. I envy such folks for their enlightenment.
In any case life goes on. Like it always does.