A Reflection For Today: The Fleeting Nature of Fame

SEE HERE What makes life meaningful? If you have not reflected on this perhaps you should. Is it success? Is it fame? What does it mean to live a meaningful life or does it mean anything at all? Is there such a thing as a meaningless life? I'm inclined to say that the question isn't meaningful because as my mother used to say, quoting Milton: "They also serve who only stand and wait." We can't know the full scope of our own meaningfulness, for it is bound up in how we touch the lives of others. Meaning only means anything in the minds of knowers and only men and women are knowers. We all touch the lives of others in a myriad of ways each day and don't know it. Only in the mind of God can that impact be known. Our own experience of our lives is not an adequate test of meaningfulness, indeed, excessive focus on ourselves is more a defect than a virtue.

As C.S. Lewis has said:"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

I think we can substitute for "original" the notion of "being meaningful" and then we see that it is seeking the truth always that ultimately makes for a meaningful life. I think that is true. It is truth that is meaningful and ultimately the Truth that is most meaningful of all.