Today is April 25 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often are you building meaning into your life?
John W. Gardner served as the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson.
In a November 10, 1990 speech entitled "Personal Renewal" delivered to McKinsey & Company in Phoenix, Arizona Gardner provided a deeply insightful view of personal development.
In his speech he focused on viewing life as an endless process of self-discovery.
Gardner observed that life is neither a mountain to summit, a riddle to answer, or a game to win. Instead, “Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue” between our own capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving, and aspiring and the life situations in which we find ourselves.
But viewing life as an endless process of self-discovery is a challenge. Our commitments to our career, our families, and other external pressures present obstacles for us to overcome.
Recognizing these obstacles is critical to our own self-awareness and personal development. Life is precariously brief and you if you spend too much time blinded to an obstacle it could jeopardize your development.
At the end of his speech Gardner told the story of a father whose 20 year-old daughter had been killed in an auto accident. The father found a piece of paper that she carried with her. On that paper was a paragraph from a previous speech of Gardner's. Here it is: "Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."
How often are you building meaning into your life?