Quick Musings on Meaning and the Future
Eating black beans at breakfast can be an enlightening experience. I am Mexican and I like beans of course. My mother used to cook them in different styles, but there was this particular recipe that I did not like when I was a kid. It is a type of soup that is one of my favorite meals as an adult. It is simply delicious. I grew up in a house where there was not a lot of money for fancy meals. I now understand my mother’s frustration with her picky eater kid. It was hard for her to put a plate on the table. The least I could do was just eat whatever it was. Every time we’re on the phone we remember several anecdotes about this and laugh it off.
I had black beans for breakfast last weekend. Alone in a beachfront restaurant, I had an insightful moment while eating them. Each bite felt like a long overdue “I’m sorry” to my mother for not appreciating as a kid the effort she put on each one of those plates. Each bite felt like a relief expressed in a burst of gratitude. I couldn’t hold the tears for much longer, so I stopped eating them. Too much love irradiating from a simple cup of black beans soup. I felt plenty and thankful. The sound of the waves breaking on the shore added an emotional note. My eyes wandered to the horizon and I started laughing because although the moment was beautiful, it was also silly. I was literally crying while eating beans. I thought that beans were meaningful to me, but at the same time, they have no meaning on their own. Beans are just beans.
I spent the rest of the day thinking about how ‘meaning’ works. Meaning is a substance we attach to stuff but stuff is inherently meaningless. Things are just things that exist out there. I have written elsewhere that objects are unknowable, they can not be reduced to one single quality. Beans are seeds, but also are a dish and a cultural symbol for Mexicans, but they are also an anecdote for my mother and me, they are also organic matter, and molecules and atoms, beans are also the work of farmers and bees, and bacteria that fertilized the soil. Thinking about things makes you conclude that we can never exhaust all the ways in which things exist. Beans are infinite if you think of the number of interrelations and components that make beans to be beans.
The phenomenon of meaning is a mental process that we can’t avoid running over things. We interact with the outside world via our sensory organs, our brain triggers several heuristics to make sense of them, and we feel emotions about the experiences we have, for the persons we encounter, or for the objects we stumble upon. Ultimately, we will end up assigning meaning to everything around us. We are meaning-making entities, our human minds need this to relate to the outside world. We need meaning to keep going.
But stuff out there? Stuff is constantly happening. Reality is just a bunch of stuff happening all the time, that’s all there is. Events, phenomena, personas, things, experiences, ideas, stars, worms, plants, shoes, chairs, beans (of course), songs, animals, and everything that exists, are just a flux of energy “happening” from one moment to another, and we perceive them as a cohesive “something”. But none of them have intrinsic meaning on their own, they don’t mean anything at all, we make them meaningful because we can, because we need it. Meaning is produced, not found.
It may sound obvious but what is worth exploring is that if Meaning (capitalized from now on) is a process, then it can be used with explicit effort to create new realities. This is because Meaning creates the “flavor” of the world around us. We can totally use this mechanism to our advantage.
At this point of our argument, let’s be careful because Meaning is a subjective experience. What is meaningful to a person is not for another person. What is meaningful for a group might not be for another collective. Beans are the perfect example. We face the risk of getting stuck in circular reasoning if we observe that Meaning has no meaning either, while this is true, it does not diminish its power as a creative tool.
So why do we need new realities and why Meaning is important? Perhaps the real question could be: What do we want to be meaningful? What is right now not working so that we can think of a different possibility. We do have a real crisis upon us, a global one that not only affects us humans but everything that exists on this planet, every single living being is in danger. The climate crisis threat is a dark future that is quickly unraveling before us. Portions of that future are visible in the present.
We see floods, droughts, famine, immigration, icebergs breaking and crashing causing sea levels rising, and the permafrost melting releasing dangerous methane gases into the atmosphere. Shit is only going to get hotter and hotter. We see homes being destroyed, not only human homes but animals and plants too are losing what they have been building for generations. We too are animals, shouldn’t we feel more empathy for them? Preserving our homes, their homes, and letting plants do their thing (as they have been doing for millions of years) should be meaningful to everybody, right?
We need bigger dreams. We need to dream of utopias. We need to dream of new possible futures. Futures where we can coexist with all living beings, sentient and non-sentient, with rocks, plants, insects, worms, rivers, trees, bees, waterfalls, forests, and coral reefs. We have no other home to go to.
Home should be meaningful, right?
Why then does it seem that home does not mean the same for everybody? There is a default narrative that runs in how we organize our living and our position above “nature over there”. It is a narrative of oppression of one gender above the rest, of one species above the others. These are ideas that are interested in preserving forms of oppression based on skin color, capital, sex, nationality, and other aspects that shouldn't be meaningful in that way.
This capitalistic white western heterocentric patriarchal extractivist human-centered script we have been reproducing in auto-pilot is a dangerous one and is clear that is not working anymore. We need to stop dreaming that dangerous dream that is pushing us forward to dark futures.
We need bigger dreams.
The question now becomes: Who’s imagining the future? Who’s dreaming of brighter dreams?
Let those not conforming with the default script do their exploration of new realities. We must secure that those who are dreaming of queer dreams, inclusive dreams, dreams of coexistence with non-humans, plants, and animals, and dreams of abundance to follow their instinct. Let racialized kids, immigrant kids, and gender-diverse kids imagine a future where the quality of existence is meaningful.
Whatever turns out to be meaningful for them (for us) dreamers of the future is what holds the key to making those brighter futures start unfolding. The dreams of the dark boys imagining an apocalyptic future are to be crushed by our bigger dreams.
If everything that exists is devoid of intrinsic Meaning and stuff is just random happenings, then we can use our power to attach the right Meaning to them in a way that guides us into desirable futures.
When something feels meaningful to you, then follow that lead, which most likely is a seed of a future worth exploring. They can be any type of exploration like art, crafts, meditation, songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry, food, teaching, caregiving, gardening, drawing, love, and love. We need more flavors of love.
A diverse future where all forms of existence are valid. A future where we can keep growing in all directions, where we nurture each other. A future where home is wider.
We must keep the future open.
