“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.”
—Harold S. Kushner
Mankind lives to give an answer for why he lives, and in the absence of an answer, he lives to divert his attention from the question. Now, the attainment of pleasure, or power, may, in fact, be the meanings ascribed to “why” of one’s life; but such hollow answers beg further questions—not the least being whether it is the quest for or the temporal grasp of power or pleasure that informs meaning? I would argue that the best these things can offer is meaning in diversion from the terror of having no ultimate answer.
If I might stretch his words beyond the framework within which they reside, Kushner’s definition of life as a quest, and that a quest in pursuit of meaning, for me conveys a sense of the infinance of desire. In life, meaning is never a static commodity that once grasped remains forever in hand; it is continually being defined and redefined, understood and expanded, lost and found again. We may know our meaning but we are ever seeking to affirm it in an unfolding experience. Ultimately, this inexhaustible search for an answer is owed to the reality that our answer is birthed from our being made by the One who is infinite for Himself: meaning in life is found in union with the giver of life. Such an overarching telos is refracted in a thousand manifestations within the individual and collective endeavors of Mankind—the often minuscule things that are made supremely meaningful as they are permeated by and for communion with the infinite God.
In a Mirror Dimly 