As De Certeau (1988) found in his exploration of the practice of everyday life, things which are close at hand are meaningful because they are immediately useful. The way in which people associate with others in the community in which they live is through a common knowledge of where to get a decent cut of meat, or a meeting at their preferred café which they get to through a short cut through the streets which they know of, and at which they might discuss how to get a new job, or where they can have their car fixed. These are examples of how people get by in work or life in general. The commonsense understanding of meaningfulness lies in this sense of connectedness with other people and with one’s context, and is realized through a mosaic of the mundane.
The paradox of the objective/subjective definition of meaning is apparent in the key skill of establishing rapport with clients in the client centered approach to therapy. The therapist has to listen carefully to the client. Even where the client has difficulty in engaging, the therapist has to provide an opportunity for him/her to communicate (du Toit, 2009). Despite the expertise of the therapist, the will to act rests with the client. The client’s lived experience qualifies him/her to challenge the therapist’s knowledge, however objective that knowledge might be in the perspective of the therapist (Sinclair, 2007). To appreciate and come to terms with the kind of knowledge such lived experience may reveal, therapists may have to prepare, just as they would when they study in order to expand their clinical and theoretical knowledge, by developing their awareness of and accepting other perspectives of meaningfulness. This entails being aware of the subjectivities which have been absorbed through the process of becoming a therapist, or the culture and society in which one grew up. These subjective contexts provide individuals with ideological definitions of meaning that exclude recognition of the experiences of other people. For example, even in occupational therapy education, Beagan (2007) found that working class occupational therapy students tended not to discuss personal experiences in class because the dominant middle class milieu of the university made them feel insignificant. They thought that what they said would simply not be heard, an indication that they were made to feel that their lives were not as meaningful as those of their more privileged classmates.
As healthcare workers, occupational therapists often deal with problems that arise from social and economic disparities and their consequences on health. The knowledge that professionals use is often learned as a set of technical interventions. These are often presented as specialized forms of knowledge, applied in clinical settings; whereas the conditions being treated are experienced quite differently by the people who are being treated (Frank, 1995; Mattingly, 1998). The experiences of anxiety, discomfort, pain, disability, the disruption of life narratives, and the social narratives which clients have, can be explained to but not always shared experientially with the therapist. The life trajectory of the therapist may often be different from that of the client in many respects, and each may experience subjective differences in the definition of meaning and what is meaningful.
In this chapter we have very broadly discussed various perspectives of meaningfulness. Our concern remains to explore how daily occupational life may be used to enhance meaning in peoples’ lives. One of the things that we want to emphasize though, because there often is a misunderstanding, is that meaning should not be confused with happiness. As Belliotti (2001, p. 129) stated: ‘Meaningful lives…are not necessarily happy lives’. Frankl (1992) certainly understood this because he experienced persecution and many losses but came to recognize that painful events may be meaningful. Many people who choose to relate their experiences in writing describe periods of pain and struggle. African National Congress leaders Alfred Luthuli (1963) and Nelson Mandela (1994) and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. (2000) are examples. Like many of the worker writers whose lives are explored in the next chapter, the meaningfulness they appear to have experienced did not preclude moments of unbearable pain and unhappiness.
Thus, it is difficult to know for sure how happy individuals who have lived meaningful lives were. Readers can only project their experiences empathically onto them in the form of thinking ‘I would be happy, or unhappy, if I was in their circumstances’. Despite the difficulties they endured, including imprisonment, physical violence, loss of loved ones and friends, and threats to their lives, none of the people listed in the above examples lived their entire lives in distress. King (2000) certainly understood himself to have a destiny to fulfill and seemed to have faced the possibility of assassination with equanimity. What we want to underscore, as stated earlier, is that a meaningful life is not necessarily a happy one, since meaning and happiness are not inextricably linked, although, ‘…happy lives, at least those that are not artificially induced, are invariably meaningful’ (Belliotti, 2001, p. 129). In other words, meaningfulness does not equate with happiness, but happiness always subsumes meaningfulness.
Note
1 There are those who argue that bad as the working conditions were in factories, such conditions were still better for factory workers than for those in rural areas. Drucker (1993) for example argued that even though it was true that the conditions in factories during the industrial revolution period were indeed abysmal, factory workers often enjoyed a higher standard of living and experienced a higher life expectancy than their rural counterparts.
Applying the ideas discussed in Chapter 1
Think of a client with whom you are working right now. Bearing the issues of concern for this client in mind, think about the following:
• Based on the discussion in chapter 1, what is your understanding of the construct ‘meaning in life’?
• Based on that personal understanding of what meaning in life entails, and your understanding of the issues of priority for your client, what do you think is the status of your client’s meaning in life (or lack there-of)?
A quick appraisal of your client’s sense of meaning in life
Ask your client to rate himself on how meaningful he perceives his life to be at the moment using the rating scale in the following assessment.
Caution: The indicators of meaning in life in the self-assessment below are based on propositions in the reviewed literature. Please explain to the client that the purpose of the self-assessment is to enable the client to identify areas of her internal experience of life in which she could increase satisfaction. This has nothing to do with whether or not her life is meaningful in any objective sense, as an internal experience is not something that can be measured externally by observers. The client may even be able to think of other indicators of meaning in her life that are not listed here. If she does so encourage her to list them in the ‘Other Indicators of Meaning in your Life’ category and rate herself on them accordingly.
Ensure that the client understands that a low score in this self-assessment does not mean that his life is meaningless or worthless, but it merely means that perhaps in the client’s mind, he could optimize meaning for increased satisfaction with his life. Irrespective of what we feel about how our lives are going, it would be wise to remember that if we ask those close to us, they will probably tell us that our lives are immeasurably important to them irrespective of our accomplishments and failures. Ultimately, an individual is the best judge of personal circumstances and in the end it is the individual’s opinions and feelings about life that matter.
Fig 1.1: Assessment of perceived meaning in life
