Meaning

I've spent the week taking a health and fitness class, but what I learned this week went way beyond health and fitness. Truly, your health and your body affect every aspect of your life. One conversation branched off into a certain direction, and a man named Larry brought in this poem from Sir Laurens van der Post, from Hasten Slowly, a film by Mickey Lemle. I found it so touching when he read it aloud that I asked Larry for a copy of it, and he immediately went to a copy machine and missed the next part of our class in order to give me this:

The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about two "hungers."
There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger.
The Little Hunger wants food for the belly;
but the Great Hunger,
the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning...

There's ultimately only one thing that makes
human beings deeply and profoundly bitter,
and that is to have thrust upon them
a life without meaning.

There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness,
But of far more comfort to the soul
is something greater than happiness
or unhappiness, and that is meaning.
Because meaning transfigures all.
Once what your are doing has for you meaning,
it is irrelevant whether you're happy
or unhappy. You are content- you are not alone
in your Spirit- you belong.