Changing in Company: Part I

by M. Joseph Boehler

We reach for meaning the way we reach for things: with the instinct to grasp, to hold, to keep. Like an object waiting to be discovered. But meaning was never misplaced, nor does it yield to hands. It is not a product we can assemble by following instructions and be done. An item can be purchased and stored. Meaning cannot.

Instead, we need only view what our world suggests: nothing exists independent of anything else. We are all tangled in an unimaginably complex web of cause and effect; everything has always been transforming together.

To find meaning in this sounds daunting, if not impossibly abstract. I think a helpful analogy to use for this is music. A single note, alone, may mean nothing. But in relation to other notes, balanced against one another, it creates a fundamentally new reality. Our meaning is what lies beneath the melody, in the space between notes.

Unlike a purchase, meaning cannot be shelved. It cannot be hoarded away and retrieved later unchanged. If you stop playing, the music fades. This is not a limitation: it is the nature of becoming in relation to everything else.

Yet here often builds a quiet tension. Some spend lifetimes trying to collect the perfect note, believing if they can just isolate the right tone, the right moment, the right possession, they will finally arrive at meaning. They build walls against alternatives. They stack achievements like currency. They fortify themselves against change, against loss, against the ordinary erosion that everyone experiences. But in doing so, they are seeking meaning precisely where it cannot survive. The note held in silence becomes unheard, it becomes dust to time. The melody trapped within suffocates.

And here enters an even deeper paradox: to earn meaning is not to extract it from the world. It is to contribute a quality of becoming that enriches our relational web of cause and effect from which we emerge. A mouthful, and even more to consider. But the moment you try to hold what you have earned, the moment you point and say, "this is mine, this is me," you begin to lose it all. Meaning is not possessed, even by those who have worked for it. It exists only in the giving, in the release, in the continuing. This is not a punishment, it is the structure of reality istelf.

This is not to say effort is futile. Effort is essential, but it has a different shape than we assumed. It is not the effort of acquisition. It is the effort of attention: to remain present to our relations, to choose how we change alongside others, to notice what our becoming contributes to the whole. The musician does not own the expression. But the musician's discipline, the honed craft, the willingness to learn, to ponder as much as to play, is what makes the expression live. Effort is not eliminated; it is redirected from grasping to attending.

Yet another contradiction presses against us, and it would be dishonest to ignore it. How does one live this way amid systems that reward the opposite? Our economies reward accumulation. Our cultures celebrate the fortified self. Our institutions measure worth by what we hold, not by how we relate. To practice meaning as becoming rather than possessing is to truly swim against currents that have been flowing for a long time. This is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural tension that anyone who takes this idea seriously will confront daily: at work, in relationships, in the quiet moments where choosing connection over extraction costs something real.

There is no clean resolution to this. Anyone who offers one is selling something. What can be said is this: living amid contradiction does not invalidate the insight. It tests it. The musician performs within systems of noise and indifference, and still the expression matters: perhaps more so, precisely because it is not guaranteed. That meaning must be practiced against resistance does not make it impossible. It makes it meaningful.

With this perspective, meaning is not hard to find. It is available everywhere, continuously, simply in the act of changing well in the company of what also changes. Not perfectly, not permanently: but well. Without severing what sustains us. Without pretending we stand outside the web that we depend upon. And without pretending the world makes this easy. It simply makes it available.