Creating Meaning

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to ultimately be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.” — Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who’s known best for creating what we now call Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In short, it explains what we crave as humans and in what order we crave them. Interestingly enough, the highest level essentially states that we’ll begin searching for purpose beyond our selves. To add onto the mystery, this quote encourages us to look inwards for outwards reasoning.

This quote allows me to strongly elaborate the idea that each of us contributes to the world through embodiment of our truest selves. It’s an idea I’ve spoken about before, and I’ve explained that a perfect person doesn’t exist because of said idea. 

Maslow points out that we must be whatever we can be. This means that whatever we can’t be, we must not be able to be. Talk about double negatives…

In other words, we’re all capable of a lot of things. Probably millions of different things that we don’t even realize or appreciate. However, we must constantly be those things — otherwise we’re an incomplete piece of art. Take that with a grain of salt though; if we really truly aren’t able to do something, we aren’t meant to. This aligns with Murphy’s Law, which states that anything that can happen will happen. Whatever we can do, we must do. Whatever we can be, we must be. It’s quite an interesting idea to toss around your head.

Doing everything we can allows us to be successful in society, but being everything we can allows us to be at peace with ourselves. It allows us to rest our heads on our pillows every night and think “Wow. I earned this rest because I really did a lot today.” Of course, we’ll probably fall asleep shortly after that thought if we’re truly doing our best during the day :D. Eventually this leads to overall satisfaction in our lives because we constantly are able to tell ourselves “Hey, I’m doing good. I’ve done all these things today and I’ve kept my mind clean today. This is good. I’m okay.”

Do what you can. Strive for what you can. Be your best self, and you might just realize that your best self is better than you could ever imagine.

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Like what you read? Be sure to share this post with your friends and family, comment, and follow this page. It helps me out a lot, and you can always change your mind later. Also, feel free to ask questions! Conversations work better than lectures. Stay tuned for future posts, and try to be the reason someone smiles today 🙂