We often ask this question about our lives: "Where do we go from here?" That answer often feels essential to getting out of bed and out the door each morning. Another way of posing that question may reach for something even more essential: "In what way, in what form, do we see the here we're in?"
Like the child with the toy in random pieces, we feel uncomfortable with formlessness. Formlessness brings us to the face of chaos. The face of chaos brings us to face the unacceptable, if not the untenable. It brings us close to an existential nothingness, a vacuum in which our sense of identity cannot come into being, as with the child, or cannot maintain its integrity, as we can feel we face each day, can experience every day.
Until we reach an almost unimaginable state of internal stability or surety of self, we sense our existence as a self against the background of the world and the others in that world. We arrive at our sense of self because the rest of the world, the world in which our identity exists, exists in itself. We experience the world as a relatively stable place on which our self counts for its reference points. We need such points of contact which allow for and support the existence, the growth, and maintenance of that self, our sense of self.
In some very substantial way, we endlessly take our measure from the world around us. The child playing with the new toy and all its many pieces, measures her/him self and her/his ability to act productively and effectively in the world by doing something with those pieces, bringing them into some form. When that child cannot make anything out of those pieces, she/he may accept that fact and simply play with them as pieces to be grabbed, horded, thrown about, and generally abused. Paradoxically, that child just made some form out of those pieces by assigning them the function of pieces-to-be-thrown-about-and-abused. Even frustration can lead us into form because we need to perceive the existence of form so deeply that we find or make it happen in spite of all appearances. Making a mess may come to some as making form.[1]
The child may feel temporarily satisfied with assigning pieces-to-be-thrown-about-and-abused as a form for the new toy. However, we really strive to make not only form out of the world. We strive to find or make meaning out of that form. That sense of meaning about form links directly to our sense of our meaning, our self, through participating with and in that form. When making a mess out of seemingly random parts satisfies the child permanently, it might mean that child will live quite chaotically as she/he grows into adulthood if emotionally that child ever reaches adulthood. Most of us know someone who lives seemingly comfortably in a state of seeming formlessness with apparent ease and satisfaction. Living with such a person can prove difficult because that person cannot or will not see what we see as disorder as disorder. That person feels a rightness about such disorder in our terms because that person may feel no essential confidence in getting beyond the pieces-to-be-thrown-about-and-abused stage of her/his identity. The child with the formless toy prevails. That meaning perspective, early formed, has become part of the self of that person, part of the vision of the person, and has become an essential way of seeing and experiencing the world—a meaning perspective.
That's quite a perspective to live with. We all have them—meaning perspectives—just not that same one.