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Book Excerpt from The Van Gogh Blues

Meaningful Life, Meaningful Work, Meaningful Days

By Eric Maisel, PhD

In order for you to live an authentic, meaningful life, which is the principal remedy for the depression creative people experience, you must feel that 1) the plan of your life is meaningful, 2) the work you do is meaningful, and 3) the way your spend your time is meaningful. These are three separate but related tasks, each with its own logic, demands, and obstacles.

Because these three tasks are truly separate, it is entirely possible to construct a simple life plan that makes meaning sense to you — say, that you will write truthfully and love deeply — as you embark on a difficult writing project that consumes you but that you can’t bring to fruition and find that your days feel meaningless because your creative efforts are failing and your intimate life is on hold. In this scenario, your life plan feels meaningful but your actual work and your actual days do not.

Conversely, an earthquake may strike your city and cause a great catastrophe that forces you to let go of your life plan and dive into rescue efforts. Oddly, these days are likely to feel more meaningful than your days struggling with your writing did, as helping others carries with it built-in meaning. In this scenario, your days feel meaningful, but at night you will be struck by the feeling that you are “merely” living since you are not doing your chosen work or living according to your life plan.

All sorts of permutations and combinations of these three tasks are possible. The ideal combination, of course, is that your life plan feels meaningful to you and you actually live it; that the work you’ve chosen to do feels meaningful to you and you actually do it; and that your days, spent primarily doing your work and living your life plan, feel filled with meaning. To reach this goal, you must consciously hold the following four intentions:

1. To articulate a life plan that feels meaningful and to strive to live by that plan.
   
   
2. To articulate what constitutes worthy work and to accomplish that worthy work.
   
   
3. To articulate how the seconds, hours, weeks, and years that make up your life will be made to feel meaningful and to strive to actually make them feel meaningful.
   
   
4. To put the first three intentions into practice in a coordinated way.

The First Intention: Articulating a Life Plan

The more abstract our life plan, the easier it will be to feel good about it but the harder it will be to know concretely what we are affirming. The more concrete our life plan, the easier it will be to know what our tasks are but the more likely we are to overwhelm ourselves with tasks and narrow our possibilities.

If my life plan is “to love and to create,” I have a strong, affirmative guiding principle that I can easily remember. But I still must flesh it out if it is to have any real meaning. If, conversely, my life plan is “to write an excellent novel every year, selling and promoting each one after it is written, marry and have three children, have lots of friends and make music with them, investigate every subject that piques my interest, and stand up for truth, beauty, and goodness while convincing others that truth, beauty, and goodness are the highest ideals,” then I have set out with considerable clarity what I intend to do with my life, but I have also boxed myself into a corner. Now I need not only children, but three children and not only many novels written and published, but one a year and each a success. This specific life plan, with its many hard-to-achieve goals, practically guarantees a regular and maybe even constant upsetness with the facts of existence.

Given that both approaches entail difficulties, which is better to put into place, a short, abstract life plan sentence or a long, detailed one? If you were holding just one intention, to live your life plan, then a detailed life plan would prove necessary. But because you must hold four intentions — to live your life plan, to do worthy work, to make your time feel meaningful, and to coordinate these three tasks — you should create a brief life plan sentence that allows for maximum flexibility and that provides a memorable reminder of your goals on Earth. Then add details and necessary complexity when you flesh out your other intentions.

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Excerpted from the book The Van Gogh Blues: A Creative Person's Path Through Depression © 2008 by Eric Maisel. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.