Where does the will for meaning comes from?

The rain swirls and beats. Lightning reveals a familiar schoolyard in a ghostly light. I feel a sudden poignancy. Images strikes my mind. The wind is the scream of a lost spirit, searching the earth and finding no good, recalling old bereavements, lashing the land with tears. Consciousness leaves my body, moves out in time and space. I undergo an expanding awareness of self, of separateness, of time flowing through me, bearing me on, knowing I have a chance, the one chance all of us have, the chance of a life, knowing a time will come when nothing lies ahead and everything lies behind, and hoping I can then look back and feel it well spent. How, in the light of fixed stars, should one live?

So begins the hunger for meaning.

--Allen Wheelis

Where does the will for meaning comes from?

Man searches for a scheme of things larger than his own life, with greater authority, to which he may belong. The hunger from which this search issues is profound and inalienable. If he can find such a scheme and make his life "mean" something in it, that is, contribute to it, makes a difference, he will have ferried something of his mortal self across the gulf of death to become a part of something that will live on. The doomed life must leave a residue of value. The carrier and guarantor of this value is a man-made scheme of things perceived as reality and presumed to be eternal.

--Allen Wheelis

Where does the will for meaning comes from?

What do we do with our lives?
We leave only a mark?
Will our story shine like a life?
Or end in the dark?
Give it all or nothing!
--Tina Turner (We Don't Need Another Hero)