Most people move through life as if meaning is something that comes later.
A week unfolds, full of tasks, conversations, and obligations. Only afterwards do we decide what it was “about”. We explain it to ourselves. We give it shape in hindsight. Purpose is something we add, not something we meet at the start.
This posture feels normal. Life keeps moving, and interpretation follows behind it. Plans are made, routines settle, effort is applied, and meaning is assembled gradually from whatever seems to fit. Nothing about this feels dramatic or wrong. It’s simply how life is organised.
Over time, this way of living becomes so familiar that it goes unnoticed. Meaning is treated as flexible, personal, and largely self-managed. What matters is assumed to be something we determine for ourselves, once the immediate demands have been handled.
From the inside, this can feel like competence. Things are dealt with. Responsibilities are carried. Life stays in motion.
And yet, the question of what any of it is for is often left until later, when there is time, or energy, or a reason to ask.
When meaning is treated as something that can always be added later, it slowly changes how pressure is carried.
Life fills up easily. Tasks accumulate. Decisions stack. Each thing on its own is manageable. Together, they create a steady demand to keep going, to keep explaining, to keep things coherent enough to move forward. Meaning becomes something that has to be maintained alongside everything else.
Over time, this adds a quiet strain. Not a crisis, but a background effort. Experiences need to be interpreted quickly so they don’t interrupt momentum. Ambiguity feels costly. Unanswered questions are postponed, not because they are unimportant, but because there is rarely room to hold them open.
When that pressure increases, the need for clarity can harden into urgency. Explanations are valued less for how accurate they are than for how quickly they restore order. Simple stories steady the ground. Narrow meanings feel safer than unresolved ones.
This doesn’t usually look like panic. It looks like efficiency. Like decisiveness. Like moving on.
But the cost is subtle. Attention shortens. Complexity becomes tiring. Meaning, once flexible, starts to feel blunt. What was meant to help life make sense begins to serve a different role: keeping things under control.
And in that posture, something essential is lost, not all at once, but gradually, as fewer experiences are allowed to remain open long enough to be truly understood.
There is another way this pattern has been understood.
Some traditions suggest that meaning is not primarily something we assemble in hindsight, but something that is already present and waiting to be noticed. Not as a rule or a plan, but as a quality of reality itself. In this view, the work is not to produce coherence, but to become attentive to what is already there.
Seen this way, the strain described earlier doesn’t come from a lack of effort, but from carrying too much authorship. From assuming that significance must be supplied, maintained, and defended by the self. The pressure eases not through better explanations, but through a loosening of that grip.
Meaning, on this account, does not arrive at the end of activity as a verdict. It precedes it as something that can be encountered, resisted, or missed. Clarity is less about control and more about perception.
This does not remove uncertainty. It changes its role. Instead of being a problem to solve quickly, uncertainty becomes part of how attention is trained. What matters is not settled by speed, but disclosed over time.
In that light, the question is no longer only how meaning is made, but whether it is being allowed to appear at all.
Where in your life have you been assuming that meaning must be supplied quickly, in order to keep things moving, rather than allowing it to emerge through attention over time?
Texts for Christmas Day (Mass during the Day)
- Isaiah 52:7–10
- Psalm 98:1–6
- Hebrews 1:1–6
- John 1:1–18
Toward The Good 