The concept of meaning starts with emptiness. It is like an empty bowl.

You may fill an empty bowl with whatever you may wish – whether it be rice, fruit or soup – and yet it is impartial to its contents.

And after you fill your bowl you soon empty it again.

You ingest its contents, let them nourish you, and then the next day fill your bowl with something else and repeat the process all over again.

Most of the time however, the bowl stays empty. And so it is with meaning.

It starts out as an empty bowl, but people are uncomfortable with emptiness.

They like things they can conceptualise.

Things they can feel.

So they quickly fill their empty bowl of meaning with whatever happens to come along, or with whatever makes them feel good.

This is fine, but the problem is most people just leave their acquired meaning in the bowl. They never fully ingest its contents and let them nourish themselves.

The bowl never goes back to being empty. It never gets the chance to be filled with anything else... something different.

And just like rice in a bowl that never gets eaten gets rotten and stale, so does uningested meaning.

The beauty of meaning is the fact that it may be whatever you wish. There is no intrinsic meaning of anything.

You may fill your bowl again and again with different substance. You may find different meanings for the same thing and this is just fine. No contradiction needs to occur.

Moreover, the treasures with which you may fill your bowl of meaning are unlimited.

They are plentiful and boundless, and as deep as the dark blue sea. They can be positive, negative, or both at the same time.

But don’t ever let your treasures of meaning go to waste. Never let them go stale. Ingest these treasures, let them nourish your being.

Then let the bowl go back to being empty, without being uncomfortable about the emptiness.

In fact, if you truly understand this, the emptiness is liberating.