The Meaning Maker

The Meaning Maker

I don't know exactly what I believe anymore.

There was a time when I did.

There was a time when the world seemed to come with answers already attached to it. There was God. There was heaven. There was a reason for everything. There was a plan. Things happened because they were supposed to happen, and somewhere beyond my understanding there was an author who already knew how the story ended.

I don't have that kind of certainty anymore.

I don't know what happens when we die. I don't know whether someone is listening when we speak into the darkness. I don't know whether the strange coincidences of our lives mean something or whether human beings are simply very good at finding constellations among otherwise unrelated stars.

I still believe there is something.

What that something is, I couldn't tell you.

But somewhere along the way, I discovered that losing certainty did not make life meaningless.

It made meaning more important.

I recently discovered that there is a word for much of the way I have spent my life thinking: existentialism.

I had always imagined existentialism as something darker. A man in a black turtleneck sitting in a café somewhere in Paris, smoking a cigarette and wondering why any of us bother getting out of bed.

Maybe there is some of that.

But the existentialism I recognize in myself isn't really about believing that nothing matters.

It is almost the opposite.

It is the terrifying realization that things matter because they don't last.

Maybe there isn't some predetermined meaning waiting for us to discover it. Maybe we participate in creating it.

Maybe we are meaning makers.

And apparently, I have been one for a very long time.

I understand my life through symbols.

I didn't realize how much until I began writing seriously.

A movie isn't always just a movie to me. A place isn't just a place. A photograph isn't just a photograph. A rock isn't just a rock.

Somewhere inside these ordinary things, I find pieces of myself.

I can watch Bruce Wayne climbing from a prison in The Dark Knight Rises and somehow see something about my own life in it. He had spent years trying to eliminate fear, believing fearlessness made him strong. But at the bottom of that prison, he learns that the men who climbed while protected by a rope never escaped.

The only person who ever made the climb did it without one.

Fear wasn't the weakness.

Fear was the thing reminding him that he had something to lose.

That mattered to me.

I understood it.

Not because I believe I am Batman or because my life resembles his literally, but because sometimes fiction gives us a language for things we haven't figured out how to say about ourselves.

Sometimes a cave is not a cave.

Sometimes it is every place you have ever been trapped inside yourself.

Sometimes climbing out means deciding there is still something in this world worth returning to.

I have found myself doing this everywhere.

A phoenix can become a reminder that destruction isn't necessarily the end of the story.

A road can become freedom and loneliness at the same time.

A photograph can become proof that for one fraction of a second, I was there.

Even the word nomad eventually became something larger than traveling for work. It became a way of understanding myself.

I have spent most of my adult life moving.

Highways. Airports. Hotel rooms. Job sites. Little towns nobody puts on postcards. Cities where I stayed just long enough to learn the roads before leaving again.

For years, I thought movement was simply what I did.

Now I think it became part of how I understand existence.

Everything is temporary.

Everywhere becomes somewhere you used to live.

Everyone eventually becomes someone you used to know.

And every present moment is quietly becoming a memory while you are still standing inside it.

Maybe that is why moments have always affected me so much.

I collect things.

Not expensive things, necessarily.

Little things.

Rocks. Ticket stubs. photographs. souvenirs. Objects from places I've traveled. Things that would probably mean absolutely nothing to someone else.

I remember walking with my grandmother when I was so young that most of the memories themselves are barely there anymore. We would collect rocks and bugs. Later in life, rocks became connected to her in my mind.

A rock is an absurdly ordinary thing.

There are trillions of them.

But give me one from a particular place at a particular moment and suddenly it isn't interchangeable with every other rock on Earth.

This one was there.

And so was I.

That is the strange thing human beings do.

We assign meaning.

We take something ordinary and say:

This matters.

This represents someone I loved.

This reminds me of who I was.

This came from the mountain I climbed.

This came from the beach where I stood looking at an ocean I had traveled thousands of miles to see.

This came from the place where something inside me changed.

The object hasn't changed.

We have.

Maybe that is why I have never cared much about photography as a technical pursuit. I appreciate beautiful photographs, but I don't really need to be a professional photographer.

I need to document things.

There is a difference.

I take photographs because I know what is happening to the moment.

It is disappearing.

Even as I lift the camera.

There is something almost unbearably beautiful about that when you really think about it.

The light falling across someone's face will never fall exactly that way again. The people standing together may never all occupy the same place again. Someone in the photograph may eventually die. A relationship may end. A building may disappear. A child will grow older. I will grow older.

Someday I may look at a photograph and realize I had no idea how important that ordinary afternoon would become.

So I press the shutter.

Stay.

Of course it doesn't.

Nothing does.

But the photograph becomes evidence.

This happened.

We were here.

I was here.

I think that is part of what Nomad Was Here means to me too.

It isn't just a travel name.

It is almost an existential statement.

I was here.

Maybe that is one of the most human sentences ever written.

People have carved their names into trees, scratched them into prison walls, painted them inside caves, written them beneath bridges and left handprints on stone for thousands of years.

We know we are temporary.

And some part of us desperately wants to leave evidence.

Not necessarily evidence that we were important.

Just evidence that we existed.

I loved.

I hurt.

I screwed things up.

I went places.

I met people.

I stood at the foot of mountains.

I watched sunsets.

I laughed with people who are no longer here.

I lost people I thought would always be part of my life.

I became versions of myself I am proud of and versions I wish I could go back and warn.

I survived things.

I caused things.

I learned.

I changed.

I was here.

Maybe writing is another way I collect rocks.

An essay is just a more complicated souvenir.

I take something that happened—a relationship, a movie, a childhood memory, a journey, a regret, a dream—and turn it over in my hands.

I examine it.

Why did this matter?

Why did this hurt?

Why am I still thinking about it twenty years later?

What does it tell me about the person I was?

What does it tell me about the person I am becoming?

Then I put it somewhere safe.

A story.

A photograph.

A page.

A rock on a shelf.

A little marker against oblivion.

There is sadness in living this way.

I know that.

Sometimes I envy people who can simply experience things without immediately sensing their impermanence.

I have stood inside beautiful moments and already felt nostalgic for them.

That sounds ridiculous until you've experienced it.

You can be somewhere extraordinary, surrounded by people you love, and suddenly become aware that this exact arrangement of the universe has never existed before and will never exist again.

Everyone is here.

Right now.

And someday we won't be.

There have been periods of my life when that awareness became regret.

I have looked backward and wished desperately that I understood then what I understand now.

I wish I had known myself better.

I wish I had understood my darkness better.

I wish I had recognized which moments were endings while I was still inside them.

I wish I had held certain people a little longer.

I wish I had made different choices.

But existentialism, at least the way I understand it, doesn't allow me to live entirely backward.

Choice matters precisely because the past cannot be changed.

I cannot go back.

That is the cruelty of time.

It is also what gives the present its value.

There is only this.

This strange little window of consciousness in which I get to experience the world.

I don't know what came before it.

I don't know what comes after.

But I am here now.

And that has increasingly become enough for me.

My faith used to be placed somewhere beyond this life.

Now much of my faith is placed inside the moment itself.

Not faith that the moment will last.

Faith that it won't.

I know the sunset is going to disappear.

So watch it.

I know the trip is going to end.

So go.

I know people change.

So tell them what they mean to you while they can still hear it.

I know children grow up.

Take the photograph.

I know grandparents die.

Listen to their stories.

I know friendships drift apart.

Be there while they are still close.

I know love can end.

Love anyway.

I know I am going to get older.

Go see the mountain now.

Maybe there is a God behind all of this.

Maybe there isn't.

Maybe consciousness continues somewhere beyond what we can understand. Maybe everyone we have ever loved is waiting on the other side of something we cannot see.

I hope so.

There is still a part of me that believes there is more.

But I no longer want the possibility of another life to distract me from this one.

Because this is the life I know I have.

And this moment—this exact one—is already leaving.

Maybe that is why I write.

Maybe that is why I travel.

Maybe that is why I photograph things and collect rocks and save little objects that would look like clutter to anyone who didn't know the story.

They are anchors.

They tether me to moments that would otherwise disappear completely.

I can hold a little object in my hand years later and suddenly a door opens.

There is the place.

There is the person.

There is the weather.

There is the version of me who stood there.

Memory is imperfect, but sometimes an object knows exactly where the door is.

And I think writing works the same way.

These essays are little doors.

Someday I may read them and barely recognize the man who wrote them.

I hope so.

That would mean I kept changing.

But I will know he existed.

I will know what frightened him.

What he loved.

What he regretted.

What he was trying to understand.

What he hoped was still ahead of him.

Maybe that is all storytelling really is.

Leaving breadcrumbs through time.

I don't know if calling myself an existentialist is entirely accurate.

Maybe labels aren't especially important anyway.

I just know that I am a meaning maker.

I look at the scattered pieces of a life and instinctively try to connect them.

A childhood rock.

A prison cave in a Batman movie.

A photograph.

A failed relationship.

A road through some forgotten American town.

A mountain halfway around the world.

A dead friend appearing alive again in a dream.

A souvenir sitting on a shelf.

A sentence written at four in the morning because something suddenly made sense.

Individually, they may be nothing more than moments.

But together they become a life.

My life.

And maybe meaning isn't something hidden somewhere in the universe waiting for us to solve it.

Maybe meaning is what happens when we pay attention.

When we decide something matters.

When we pick up the ordinary rock and carry it home.

When we take the photograph.

When we tell the story.

When we stop for a moment and realize:

I am here.

I don't know what waits for me beyond this life.

I don't know whether anyone is keeping score.

I don't know whether there is some grand explanation at the end that will suddenly make everything make sense.

But I know this moment is passing.

I know someday today will be a memory.

And increasingly, that is where I place my faith.

Not in the belief that anything lasts forever.

But in knowing that it doesn't.

So I want to notice it.

I want to experience it.

I want to love it while it is here.

And every once in a while, I want to pick something up—a photograph, a rock, a story—and carry a little piece of it with me.

Not because I can stop time.

But because for one brief, impossible moment,

I was here.