From the driver’s seat, I could hear the wise, old troll telling the protagonist what it all meant. Our minivan was filled with the sounds of the animated film my daughter was watching, and I couldn’t help being drawn into the lockstep progression of the narrative. Each event had led our characters to the crisis in which they found themselves—every circumstance had prepared, the dialogue had foreshadowed—and now they were destined to discover their place on the path that lay ahead that would make it all make sense. 

Before I could hear what would become of their quest, I parked the family van at a Subway restaurant. We paused our girl’s movie and ate our lunch. 

For us, there would be no prescient wisdom bestowed by a sage Sandwich Artist. There would be no mystical boon acquired by eating the chocolate chip cookie (legendary though the taste may be).

I did try my best, though, to be polite to the Subway employee and to help my daughter eat with her manners. Perhaps we experienced the difference between real life and stories. 

“Meaning” is imbued, perceived, or spun by an observer.

Stories are fiction. To tell stories about our experiences is to wind specific significances around particular events and to present “circumstance” and “meaning” as belonging and necessary together. Yet, in seemingly the most objective view of reality, these connections are not necessarily so. Rather, all things simply do happen, and events seem to have little more to do with each other than atomic and kinetic causality, rather than metaphorical or prophetic connection.

Meaning is something which does not arise out of the physical universe itself. Meaning is imbued, perceived, or spun by an observer. By necessity, it implies a willing force, a purposeful actor, an intention behind. A definitive meaning can only be accurately decreed by one above the system in which that meaning is found.

Since that “One Above” our own system is categorically none of us, we are each engaging in fiction in all of our meaning-making story telling. Fiction is not wrong or even necessarily false; fiction simply isn’t actual. 

The Actual and The Helpful

There are truths, traits, emotions and motivations that can be distilled from our fictions that are helpful to the operation of the human heart. But we become warped versions of who we should be when we insist on protecting and promoting the interpretations, meanings, or objectives we have wrought from our fictions. To do so is to conflate the actual with the helpful.

Yes, we do foolish things to protect our belief in fictions as actual which we ought rather to be holding as simply helpful. And on some level, “actual” and “helpful” become the same thing. Indeed, what is helpful can only be so because it actually glimpses a reality. But to know definitively what that reality is is not the realm of one within the story itself.

Consider ourselves as characters in a book. To bind the other characters who inhabit the same pages as oneself to one’s specific interpretation is not wise, nor is it even possible. Only someone outside the book can shut the cover and read its title. For those in the book, the “helpful” must be pursued over the mastering desire to reach an “actual.” 

When characters within a story discover what is helpful, it is so because it is leading them toward a purpose of that story’s Author. But it is never their task to determine an “actual”—cherry picking surrounding events and their own motivations to serve as the approving, storytelling voice of a narrator—deciding for purposes of their own what would be helpful to them. To do so would be to attempt to become a tiny author oneself within a story that has a True Author; the result would not be something either true or helpful within the world of the story.

Choice would be a meaningless illusion if nothing could be helped by it.

A storybook character can hardly comprehend the existence of (much less interpret the purposes of) the ink-on-paper realm that would deterministically encapsulate their surroundings; that world is not where their mind belongs.

And yet, if we are not meant to decipher from our own experience an interpreting metanarrative, why do we seem to have a universal “story-weaving” reflex? Why would we be drawn to such an activity of the mind if it were not fitting for any in our station?

It is because there really is an Author, and we really are a part of their story. To not ultimately believe that would untether our wills from pursuing any kind of action that could be considered meaningful: choice would be a meaningless illusion if, by it, nothing could be helped after all.

Yes, there is a story where meaning matters. The very fact that our choices can help shows we are in such a story where there is an Author, and aligning with their principles is best. In this story, it looks like whatever the Author means is a lot like letting go of attempting to control others to help oneself, and seeing the greater good in choosing a love that is costly to oneself.

That’s how I see it. If it’s not helpful for you, I hope something more beautiful and meaningful is.