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I was at the gym this morning and I was overcome with a sense of meaninglessness. It’s not uncommon for me to pendulate with my cycle from the high of ovulation: a pure inspiration for life, my work, wellness, and living my liberation… and when I am luteal, a slow swing back again to a sense of apathy and existential angst.

“What’s the point?”

I asked myself, as I went ahead and lifted my heaviest weight yet. Pushing my body felt good. Feet firmly on the ground, pushing the energy downward got me back in touch with what I’ve actually been feeling.

Yes, I can do it. I can show up. And yet the past few weeks, I’ve grappled with how meaningless even my most sacred work can feel sometimes.

My trainer came over to me and checked in. She squatted down next to me and said, “Hey Mads, you okay? You don’t seem yourself lately.”

Truth be told, I haven’t felt like myself lately.

I told her the truth. I’m scared. I’m angry. I’m sad.

How even though I’ve been going to the gym because I need to and want to, I’ve been going through the motions. I told her about my grief, how I fear for my trans friends, how I fear for myself and my sisters. How activating it can be living in such a conservative area, with family who don’t believe I deserve rights– sometimes it feels like there is nowhere to put my sacred rage that makes a difference at all.

I was holding back tears.

Apathy, too, is a sensation you know. Sensations like rage and grief are sometimes so big and vast, apathy comes in to protect us.

Instead of exploding, I implode.

Although I’m 99% sure my trainer and I don’t see eye to eye on everything in a political or religious sense, her genuine care for me as a person moved me. It gave me hope. It allowed me a sense of safety in the space– which helped me move through my apathy. With each squat, I mobilized the rage with deliberate movement.

I did my best to feel it all. To push myself to a safe limit. To feel my body shake in resistance.

Within 10 minutes I went from “working out is meaningless at times like these” to “working out is exactly what I need in times like these.”

I went from judgmental, critical, apathetic, and disconnected to open, feeling, purposeful, and connected.

I don’t know about you, but the past few years it’s been harder for me to find the same motivation for my creativity, my work in the world, for my movement, and being deliberate with my devotional practices.

Meaninglessness can spread and cause all that once was thriving to atrophy like a scene from Stranger Things.

It reminds me of Ecclesiastes– probably my favorite book in the Old Testament.

For those of you without biblical context, Solomon is a king who has and has had and seen it all. Wealth. Power. Freedom. Wisdom. Play. – all of which he concludes is meaningless. It’s a 12-chapter book devoted to his grappling with a meaningless reality–

If that sounds grim, keep on keeping on. This is my favorite book in the sacred text, after all.

Solomon osculates from the beauty of the meaninglessness, and the sense of purpose it offers, back to hopelessness and from my perspective, apathetic anger, and back again.

Not unlike I seem to do.

In chapter one he speaks of wisdom, and hard work.

He says:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time…
No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them….
…I said to myself, “Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind…
…For with much wisdom comes much sorrow, the more knowledge, the more grief.

In chapter 2 he continues on to describe how all the riches, pleasures, and goodness the world has to offer, all end up also somehow feeling meaningless, just like chasing after the wind. He speaks of the tears of the oppressed, and the power of the oppressor. The injustice of the world. The cognitive dissonance in growing greater wisdom.

Solomon grapples with injustice and privilege, youth and aging, hard work and fucking off… just like so many of us are today–

He concludes in Chapter 5 that given the meaningless of it all, it is good and appropriate for a person to eat, to drink and to find satisfaction in their toilsome labor under the sun during the few days of life God has given them.

It feels like a sort of a nod to the obscurity and unfairness of life. He assesses all he has seen in life and reconciles the humbling fact of it all: the wicked and the saints, the wise and the foolish, the wealthy and the poor, the youthful and the old… all human. All flesh. All ends in death.

So you might as well eat, drink and be happy.

Sobering, possibly, yes. Perhaps why I love it.

Eerily hopeful and humanizing? I think so.

By the end of the book, he says,

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

What I glean from this sacred text is that…

Meaningless is not only a very real part of the human experience, it is a launching pad to something much more interesting.

Let’s just assume it is meaningless for a second. All of it. We are on a floating rock in an ever-expanding universe, and we have 75, 80 years here on average. Most of us don’t know our great-great-grandparents' names, and will not be known by our great-great-grandchildren.

This is a sobering fact.

This sobering feeling, that for me touches meaninglessness is a taste of humility. A taste of my smallness that when I’m in a low, overwhelmed by political upheavals, or just luteal, might make me throw my hands in the air and say “what’s the point!?”

So, let’s play with that. Perhaps it IS meaningless.

And perhaps, if it is meaningless, we get to create the meaning.

I don’t know about you, but I find cosmic relief in this perspective.

Like an exhale.

Like life is a big ole joke.

I get to be small. I get to laugh at my mistakes because they are meaningless. I get to stop trying to control it all. I get to stop taking myself so seriously. I get to forgive, and let go, and stop wishing people were different. I get to release my opinions and projections and fantasies of what will be better when I get it all my way. (By the way, I do think some things will be better when I get my way… but for the sake of surrender, just play with me here).

As meaning-making machines, it’s not a matter of if we create the meaning, we WILL create the meaning.

We are always creating the meaning.

So when meaningless comes again, as it will, and I begin overthinking about the state of the world, as I do, and when urgency comes through my body wanting to solve it all NOW, because hot damn I want to solve and fix like my life depends on it… which will inevitably leave me depleted and dry… and when I wonder if there is a point to the work I’m doing, (there is but I forget) and spiral into wondering if it matters all that much what I do and say and write…

I get to let it all be just like chasing after the wind.

I get to let it humble me.

Make me small.

Put me back into right place.

Into right size.

I get to remember my true place among all things.

I get to make the meaning I desire.

And this is where the magic really lies. Because when we go through our meaninglessness, touch our apathy, feel our rage, feel the grief, somehow we open. The ego dissolves, even for a second and we feel our place among all things.

In our right place, in our right size, in these perfect little lives we live, born at this specific time in history…

I can’t not believe it has meaning.

Even if it’s a meaning of my own creation. Even if it’s meaning I’m conjuring up.

It means something to me….

So I will keep showing up for my writing practice, because it means something to me.

And I will keep sharing my work, because this community means something to me.

And I will continue enrolling my programs, even when the world is burning, because this world, and each person in it, means something to me.

And I will go to the fucking gym and nourish my body because I mean something to me.

And I will relate to my family who believes I deserve less rights, because my rights (and theirs) mean something to me.

And I will show up for community organizing, even when I want to eye roll and even when I want to cry, because these movements mean something to me.

And I will decorate my home with the best linens I can afford, and light candles and sip my tea and burn my incense, because beauty means something to me.

And I will make love slowly and sweetly because our pleasure means something to me.

And I will continue on, because as meaningless as it all is, it all really means something to me.

It all really means so much to me.

So if you’re asking yourself lately, how do I show up in times like these?

Here’s the balm I want to share:

1- Feel the intensity of your apathy. On a scale from 1-10, how charged is it?

2- Write down the sensations of the apathy: is it heady spinning and overwhelming? Is it tingly numbness? Is it vibrating in your chest and grief-struck? Is it simmering like rage?

3- Set a timer for 10 minutes and write it all down. Write why you’re apathetic. Or angry. Or sad. Yell into the paper. Shed tears. Write why it doesn’t matter. Write it all out.

4- Read it back.

5- Now that you know it's all meaningless, write why it means so damn much to you.

This is now your guidepost.

6- Write your meaning statements. I will ____________ because it means something to me.

Over.

And.

Over.

Because you make the meaning.

And it really does mean something.

Just like I went from “working out is meaningless at times like these” to “working out is exactly what I need in times like these.”

So you can too flip the script.

“Sharing my work is meaningless at times like these” to “sharing my work is exactly what I need in times like these.”

“Going to therapy is meaningless at times like these” to “going to therapy is exactly what I need in times like these.”

“Up-leveling my income is meaningless at times like these” to “Up-leveling my income is exactly what I need in times like these.”

“Going on one walk a day is meaningless at times like these” to “Going on one walk a day is exactly what I need in times like these.”

You make the meaning. You are God expressed. And I know if you’re here, it’s because you care a whole hell of a lot. So as you touch into that meaninglessness, as you will because you’re human, let yourself go all the way through until you see the cosmic joke of it all:

You make the meaning.

It’s through you the meaning is made.

xo, Madison