Cultivating meaning: Be patient and pay attention
“O, a meaning!”
That line from a poem by Archibald MacLeish captures a modern experience: the seeming discovery of personal meaning. For most of human history, meaning was inherited — a divine order passed down through generations, explaining everything from our daily routines and jobs to our cosmic purpose and afterlife. Our significance was a given.
The Enlightenment of the late 1600s shattered this certainty, replacing revelation with reason. What was once given to us became something we had to cultivate.
David Brooks summarizes this change in a recent Atlantic article:
“Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life.”
Figuring one’s own life requires intention and attention. Which is why I like MacLeish’s lie, “O, a meaning!” We must be paying attention when meaning arrives.
A view of the garden from my studio.
The shade screen is meant to keep the birds from eating the cover crop seeds. So far, so good.
I see this interplay of intention and attention in my garden, where each day teaches me something about the nature of cultivation. Another poet, W.S. Merwin, spent decades transforming a barren valley on Maui into one of the world's most diverse palm forests. His deliberate patience reminds me that much of gardening is waiting while tending. We must let the natural processes of growth happen in their own time while we support them. We don’t grow anything; the plants do the work. And then, one day, a tomato, a beet, a palm forest!
Cultivating meaning is similar, I think. And that’s what I explore here in several ways.
Creating the conditions for meaning: Intention and surrender
Like many, I once found meaning through the certainty of organized religion, where every experience seemed to point toward a divine purpose. The question wasn't whether there was meaning but simply how to discern what was already there. It was both comforting and confining, this prescribed significance, as it left no room for organic meaning to emerge.
Creating conditions for meaning requires both intention and surrender. We must define what we value, make space for meaning by clearing what does not support our values, and wait.
This is what W.S. Merwin understood about his palm forest.
Palm
The palm is in no hurry
to be different
and it grows slowly
it knows how to be a palm
when it was a seed it knew
how to be a palm seed
when it was a flower
it knew how to be
the flower of a palm
when it was a palm it grew
slowly
and without eyes
in a salt wind—W.S. Merwin from Opening the Hand (Atheneum, 1983)
Through inner simplification — clearing away the noise of predetermined meanings and "shoulds" — we create space for authentic meaning to emerge naturally. Like Merwin's palms or my nascent garden, meaning follows its own organic process. We can't force it or rush it, but we can prepare the ground, remove obstacles, and then practice the art of patient attention (aka choosing presence).
This is cultivation in its truest sense: not making meaning happen, but creating conditions where it can arise on its own terms. Our task is to be present and receptive.
Acknowledge that meaning takes time
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
That jewel of a line comes from Annie Dillard and conveys a fundamental truth about values: they're not what we claim they are, but what our daily choices reveal. Don’t tell me what you value; show me your calendar.
When we live our values consistently, they become a lens through which meaning naturally emerges. If I value curiosity, for instance, I might notice how each question leads to unexpected answers that connect somehow, or how these connections then illuminate a pattern I hadn’t noticed before. The meaning happens gradually as we accumulate….what? I want to write “discoveries” because that’s what they feel like. O, a meaning!
This is why meaning, like gardening, requires both intention and time. We can't force meaning any more than we can force a seed to sprout. But by consistently creating conditions that align with our values — clearing away what doesn't serve them and nurturing what does — we prepare the ground where meaning can take root.
The fruit of this labor is often enjoyed only in retrospect, when we look back and see how our choices have grown into something larger than we imagined. Like my garden's first tomato (looking forward to that!) or Merwin's palm forest, meaning emerges not from our striving but from our steady devotion to what matters most.
Give it your regular attention
Paying attention — real attention — has never been more crucial or harder. Since the Enlightenment shifted us from prescribed meaning to individual discernment, we've had to choose what deserves our focus. Each day, Merwin chose to tend his land, not just by maintaining what was there but by creating conditions for new life. It doesn’t have to be hard or even significant. Merwin would compost old mail and even manuscripts.
Merwin’s palm forest.
An image from the W. S. Merwin Conservancy website, which you should absolutely visit.
Over decades, his attention transformed a barren valley into one of the world's most diverse palm collections. Similarly, meaning emerges in the accumulated practice of showing up, paying attention, and contributing toward your values.
This creates a virtuous cycle. The more we attend to what aligns with our values, the more meaning we, yes, discover. A curious person who regularly pursues questions finds unexpected connections. A gardener who shows up daily notices subtle changes in soil and growth. This discovered meaning reinforces our commitment to keep paying attention, to keep showing up for what matters.
Let's go back to the Enlightenment for a second, because there is a perceived danger in pursuing only what YOU value, not what everyone is required to value. Would this individualism weaken community? Actually, the opposite occurs.
When we understand what it means to freely cultivate our own meaning, we become fierce advocates for others' freedom to do the same. We recognize that meaningful lives require certain shared conditions: education, civic spaces, freedom of thought and expression. Like a community garden that provides plots, tools, and knowledge-sharing, these communal resources enable individual cultivation. The practice of attention thus leads naturally to civic engagement - we work to preserve and expand the conditions that allow everyone, not just ourselves, to cultivate what matters most.
Remove obstacles to meaning-making
To make way for my garden, my father-in-law and I had to pull up grass that had been growing since the early 1990s. After replanting the sod elsewhere, we pulled the remaining weeds, removed rocks, and cut back surrounding plants.
The same principle applies to cultivating meaning: we must first clear away what blocks growth. Our mental landscape is a holy mess compared to my garden lot. We are bursting with information overload, shamed if we’re not being “productive” all day, every day, and too often trying to meet expectations someone else has prescribed.
The thing is, we're choosing all of this. Every notification we enable, every feed we refresh, every "should" we accept without question — these are choices. But too often, they're choices made without first answering the essential question: What do I truly value?
Until we know what matters most to us, we can't identify what's in the way. We end up measuring success by metrics others chose - money, status, likes, views - instead of by what genuinely enriches our lives. We try to cultivate meaning while letting others determine what's meaningful.
The solution isn't complicated, but it requires courage: Stop. Identify what matters to you. Then clear away whatever doesn't serve those values. Create boundaries. Say no to good things that aren't your things. When you do, you'll find you have both the patience to wait for meaning to emerge and the attention to notice when it does.