We choose meaning, we don’t find it.
This is a paradox. Of course we find meaning, in life we are always finding meaning, but take away the events, people and conversations and sit alone in a quiet room and find meaning. You won’t find any, there isn’t any; there is only pure consciousness which is directly experienced.

When we are driven by needs and wants there is always a meaning because we are trying to get “that” in order to be “this”, achieve “this” in order to be “that”. In a nutshell, we are striving for something – “an end”.

When you take away the needs and wants, each moment becomes alive to what it inherently is, a “moment” and whatever you ascribe to that moment is your decision. You can take another route and experience that moment as a direct experience. The direct experience you experience can differ according to the level and state of consciousness /awareness dominant in that moment.

Life is a moment to moment existence and there is no meaning to anything apart from what you give it. Each moment in itself does not provide any meaning, so it’s useless trying to look for it. Events, conversations, books, experiences – all provide meaning, but to try and look into the glass without a reason and hope to find something, isn’t going to work.

If we remove all the needs and wants and sit in the empty room, after long enough, we may then decide to apply some meaning. We create a meaning. We decide what is important to us, what we would like to experience, what holds our interest, something we would like to encounter and so we begin our meaning and the whole process starts.
We go out into the world armed with our meaning and find an adventure.

It’s once we begin the adventure that the meaning really starts to take on meaning.

If we go to friends for advice, we may not always get what we came for.

Friends have a time and place, as do influential figures in history. There is a reason I make this comparison.

Quite often friends are mirrors of ourselves demonstrating similar beliefs, values and ideas about life. But the problem with friends is they might not always give us what we truly want, correction, need.

Friends can sometimes keep us on the status quo, not challenging the norm of our behaviour, for they too are familiar with our characteristics, even more so in some respect than our own personal awareness.

When we want to challenge the norm, expand, grow, push past boundaries and be even more of who we are, who are we going to model the changes on?

Comfort zones = friend zones.
I love my friends dearly, the value, insight and support into my life they bring is tremendous, but I am awake to the fact they won’t always provide me with the things I require in order to grow.

Sometimes you need to go outside your comfort zone when relating to people because it is there that we can feel most stretched.

Spending time with people who are not necessarily on our wavelength can push us into aspects of our personality we wouldn’t normally assume. At those times we not only learn to appreciate the intrinsic qualities we provide for others, but in return it highlights the diversity of other people and the fact that no-one is right or wrong, we are all simply human beings each muddling through on our own individual journeys.