The Power of Meaning

by Emily Esfahani Smith

  Parents perhaps know the value of a service mindset better than anyone. Raising children is one of the most stressful but crucial jobs a person can have—and though children can be a source of joy, an oft-cited finding from the psychological research on parenting is that raising kids makes parents unhappy. Parents sacrifice their personal time and space for their children, they lose sleep as a result of their kids, and they are constantly engaged in tiring tasks like changing diapers and enforcing discipline. At the same time, though, many studies show that raising children is a powerful source of meaning. As one mother told me, “It’s blood and guts and makes me want to pull out my hair sometimes.” But, she added, it is also “tremendously rewarding.” Parenting gives people an opportunity to put aside their own interests for the sake of another. All of the difficult and tedious work of being a parent lies in the service of a larger purpose—helping a child grow into a responsible adult.

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  In the final paragraph of Middlemarch, the novelist George Eliot pays a tribute to those individuals who keep the world moving forward in small yet indispensable ways: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

  Those many millions of people, though they may not be remembered or known by you and me, made a difference for the people they encountered in their daily lives.

  The ability to find purpose in the day-to-day tasks of living and working goes a long way toward building meaning. It was the mindset, for instance, adopted by the janitor John F. Kennedy ran into at NASA in 1962. When the president asked him what he was doing, the janitor apparently responded saying that he was “helping put a man on the moon.” It was the mindset adopted by a roadworker who was directing the flow of traffic near a repair site on a stretch of Colorado highway several years ago. Standing in the sun, he periodically turned a sign that read “Stop” on one side and “Slow” on the other. “I keep people safe,” he told a driver who asked him how he could stand such boring work. “I care about these guys behind me,” he continued, “and I keep them safe. I also keep you safe, and everyone else in all those cars behind you.” And it was a mindset adopted by a food cart owner a few years ago when my friend realized, after ordering, that he had forgotten his wallet. “My job isn’t to take your money,” he told my friend. “My job,” he said, handing my friend his taco, “is to feed you.”

  Not all of us will find our calling. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find purpose. The world is full of retail clerks, coupon sorters, accountants, and students. It is full of highway flaggers, parents, government bureaucrats, and bartenders. And it is full of nurses, teachers, and clergy who get bogged down in paperwork and other day-to-day tasks, and sometimes lose sight of their broader mission. Yet no matter what occupies our days, when we reframe our tasks as opportunities to help others, our lives and our work feel more significant. Each of us has a circle of people—in our families, in our communities, and at work—whose lives we can improve. That’s a legacy everyone can leave behind.

  Erik Kolbell vividly remembers the summer in 2003 when his daughter Kate got her first job. Kate, who was then fourteen and living in New York with her family, had been hired to work as a mother’s helper in the Hamptons. She was excited to move to Long Island and assume some of the responsibilities of adulthood. But her life, and Erik’s, came to a screeching halt two weeks after she started working. On July 31, Erik received a call from his wife: “Kate’s been hit by a car.”

  “The next thing I remember,” Erik said, “was driving in the car out to Stony Brook Hospital and not knowing how serious it was, what condition she was in, where she was hit, or if she was alive.” He eventually learned that she was in surgery with a pediatric neurosurgeon. That, Erik said, gave him three pieces of information: “Number one: she was alive. Number two: this was serious. Number three: neurosurgeon. She had a brain injury.”

  At the hospital, Erik was led to a private waiting area, where the neurosurgeon came in to see him and his wife. “She is in a medically induced coma,” the doctor said. “Her vitals are stable. We had to remove a piece of her skull,” he continued, “in order to relieve the pressure on her head, on her brain.” The procedure had never been performed on a child before, Erik said, but it was the doctor’s “Hail Mary. It was all he had.” It was not enough. Late that night, her intracranial pressure spiked. She had to be taken into brain surgery once more.

  Erik was telling this story into a microphone, on a velvet-curtained stage in a cozy wood-paneled room as part of an evening of storytelling organized by a group called The Moth. He looked out onto an audience of nearly three hundred people sitting in tightly packed rows and told them the thought that went running through his head when he found out that Kate was being wheeled into her second brain surgery of the night: “Where is the good in any of this?”

  Just twenty minutes earlier, during a boozy intermission, the room had been filled with laughter and noise. Now the audience all leaned forward in rapt silence as Erik shared his story.

  When Kate came out of her second brain surgery, Erik continued, it was 5 a.m. and she was stable. The doctors eventually transferred her to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, where she underwent intensive rounds of therapy. Because of the accident, she could no longer speak or do math, her depth perception was impaired, and she had lost nearly all of her memories. But by October, she was able to return to school part-time and continued to attend rehab. By November, she was well enough that she returned to Stony Brook so that the doctors could replace the part of her skull that they had removed in July. This would be her third brain surgery. “It was kind of a triumphal reentry,” Erik said. “It’s a way of sort of closing the door and saying, ‘Yeah, she’s going to make it.’ ”

  Still, Erik continued searching for the meaning in everything that had happened: “I’m grateful she’s alive,” he thought on the eve of her third brain surgery. “I don’t know how much more of her I am going to get back. Where is the good?”

  He found it when Kate came out of the surgery. The two of them were in the recovery room. Kate was “still woozy” from the anesthesia when a series of visitors began arriving at her bedside.

  The first person to come was a doctor. “Kate, you wouldn’t remember me,” he said. “I’m the admitting physician who was in the emergency room the day you came in.”

  Moments later, a nurse came by: “Kate, you would not remember me, but I was the nurse who was there when the original operating team came and started working on you.”

  “Kate, you wouldn’t remember me,” another guest said, “but I was the chaplain on duty when you came in and I spent time with your parents.”

  “Kate,” said the next person, “you wouldn’t remember me, but I was the social worker who oversaw your case.”

  “Kate,” yet another said, “you wouldn’t remember me, but I was the nurse on duty the second or third day.”

  It was, Erik recalled, “a parade of smiling faces.” The last visitor was a nurse named Nancy Strong, who had overseen Kate’s stay in the intensive care unit over the summer. “I pulled her aside and said, ‘You know, I think it’s great that you are all coming by to wish Kate luck. But there’s something else going on here, isn’t there?’ ”

  “Yeah,” Nancy said, “there is.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Erik,” she said, “for every ten kids we see with this injury, nine of them die. There is only one Kate. We need to come back and we need to see her, because she is what keeps us coming back to work in this place every day.”

  “This is the redemption,” Erik realized. “This is the good.”

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  As a young man, George Dawes Green, the founder of The Moth, spent many evenings at his friend Wanda’s home on St. Simon’s Island in Georgia, where he grew up. He and his friends would sit aroun
d on Wanda’s porch, drink bourbon, and tell each other stories from their lives—like the time one of them, Dayton, got drunk and let six thousand chickens escape from a barn he was responsible for tending, or the time that another, Kenny, forgot to take his lithium and swam a mile into the ocean stark naked before the coast guard caught him. Kenny, the story goes, told the coast guard to leave him alone: “Oh, I’m just fine,” he insisted; “I’m a whale.” As they took turns telling stories, Green recalls, “a troupe of moths staggered around the light, while the cicadas kept time in the live oaks.”

  Years later, Green was living in New York. He had published two novels, one of which, The Juror, became an international bestseller, adapted into a movie starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin. Green had made some money, was living in Manhattan, and attended fancy cocktail parties in the city. He was, from the outside, leading the sort of life that most writers dream about living.

  But there was something missing. One evening, at a “particularly dull” poetry reading downtown, Green realized that he longed for those enchanting evenings on Wanda’s porch. As literary as New York was, there was no place where ordinary people, like Green’s neighbors in Georgia, could come onstage to simply deliver a well-crafted, well-told personal story. So Green decided to have some people over to his apartment, where he tried to re-create, in his New York loft, the experience he had on Wanda’s porch.

  By 1997, his idea had grown into a nonprofit organization named after the moths he remembered from those nights on St. Simon’s Island. Twenty years later, The Moth has become a fixture of the New York cultural scene and an international phenomenon. Today, it puts on over five hundred shows a year in cities from London to Los Angeles to Louisville—there’s even been one in Tajikistan. In addition to the live shows, which have brought over fifteen thousand stories like Erik’s to the stage, The Moth hosts a weekly podcast and Peabody Award–winning radio show, and in 2013, it published its first story collection.

  Under the leadership of artistic director Catherine Burns, The Moth carefully selects stories for meaning. They find these stories in a variety of ways: through The Moth’s website; at StorySLAMs—open-mic competitions where anyone can sign up; and, of course, by word of mouth. No matter the source, Burns and her team look for stories that have conflict and resolution—stories that show how the storyteller developed into the person she is today—and they look for tales of change, stories that could end the way the Irish writer Frank O’Connor ended his short story “Guests of the Nation”: “And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.”

  The most moving stories, Burns has found, are rooted in vulnerability, but they are not too emotionally raw. The stories should come, as she put it, “from scars and not wounds.” They should have settled in the storyteller’s mind so that he or she can reflect back on the experience and pull out its meaning. “Sometimes,” Burns said, “when you get on the phone with someone, they think they have a story worked out, but you’ll see that it’s not resolved.”

  Once they find a good story, Burns and her team take on the role of directors. They work with the storytellers in rehearsal, helping them figure out the major narrative stepping-stones to the climax and resolution, and might suggest some subtle feedback on delivery, like pausing here or slowing down there. Burns’s intent is to make the stories resonate as strongly as possible with the audience members. But there’s a secondary effect. After working with The Moth for more than fifteen years, Burns has seen that the process of crafting a story helps the storytellers connect the events of their life in new ways, gaining insight into their experiences and learning lessons that had previously eluded them.

  At a 2005 Moth event in New York, Jeffery Rudell told a story about coming out to his parents when he was a freshman in college. He expected them to be accepting, so he was shocked when they responded by burning his possessions and cutting off all communication with him. For six years, he continued reaching out, regularly calling and writing letters, but they never responded. Eventually, he decided to make one last effort to reconnect with them. He flew home, unannounced, and showed up at his mother’s office. Even then, she refused to see or talk to him. Two weeks later, he received a black funeral wreath at his office in New York with a note that said, “In memory of our son.”

  As Jeffery prepared this story for The Moth, he initially thought it would be about anger and pain. How could his parents, who had taught him the importance of love and kindness, treat him with such hatred and disgust? “I had the whole anger theme primed and ready to go,” he said. “But there was a problem: I didn’t particularly feel angry at my parents.” After his family ostracized him, Jeffery had sought comfort from gay friends who assured him that their parents had also reacted poorly to their coming out—at least initially—but that they’d eventually grown more accepting and it was likely his parents would, too. All Jeffery needed was patience—and hope. He took their advice and for years held on to the hope that he and his parents would one day reconcile. As a result of that hope, though, his life “sort of came to a halt.”

  As he went through different drafts of the story for The Moth, Jeffery realized that he had been so focused on trying to earn back his family’s love that he never thought about his future or his own needs. He declined job opportunities and broke up with a boyfriend who was moving to Los Angeles so that he could stay in Michigan, where his parents lived. He wanted to be nearby when they were ready to welcome him back into their lives. “For years,” he said, “my relentless hoping did nothing more than keep me in a state of emotional stasis.” Eventually, he came to understand that his hope had really been a form of denial. There was no chance of resurrecting his relationship with his parents, so he let go of that wish and moved on with his life. When he did so, he was finally able to find a sense of peace and resolution.

  “The joke is,” Burns said, “that telling a story on the main stage of The Moth is like ten years of therapy.”

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  Few of us will reveal our personal histories in front of a crowd of strangers like Erik Kolbell did. But we are all storytellers—all engaged, writes the anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, in an “act of creation,” which is the “composition of our lives.” And yet unlike most stories we’re used to hearing, our lives don’t follow a predefined arc. Instead, she writes, “each of us has worked by improvisation, discovering the shape of our creation along the way.” Our identities and experiences, in other words, are constantly shifting. Like a jazz musician in the middle of an improvisation, we may follow one path, then abandon it for another. Storytelling is how we make sense of that act. By taking the disparate pieces of our lives and placing them together into a narrative, we create a unified whole that allows us to understand our lives as coherent—and coherence, psychologists say, is a key source of meaning.

  Our storytelling impulse emerges from a deep-seated need all humans share: the need to make sense of the world. We have a primal desire to impose order on disorder—to find the signal in the noise. We see faces in the clouds, hear footsteps in the rustling of leaves, and detect conspiracies in unrelated events. We are constantly taking pieces of information and adding a layer of meaning to them; we couldn’t function otherwise. Stories help us make sense of the world and our place in it, and understand why things happen the way they do. “Storytelling is fundamental to the human search for meaning, whether we tell tales of the creation of the earth or of our own early choices,” writes Bateson.

  Stories are particularly essential when it comes to defining our identity—understanding who we are and how we got that way. Take the story of Emeka Nnaka. When he was twenty-one, Emeka was a defensive end with the semipro football team the Oklahoma Thunder. During one game in Arkansas, Emeka ran to make a tackle after the ball was snapped—a play he’d made many times before. When he hit the other player, his 250-pound body fell to the ground, as it usually did. But this time, something was different: he didn’t actually feel himself f
all. All he felt, lying there on the turf as the crowd fell silent, was the tingly feeling you get when you bump your funny bone. The trainers ran out. An ambulance wailed in the distance. Emeka was carried off the field on a stretcher. He tried to lift his hand to give the crowd a thumbs-up, but couldn’t. At the hospital, he underwent a nine-hour neck surgery. When he woke up, he could not move his body below his chest.

  Emeka had not grown up playing football. He threw the ball around a bit in high school, but it was not until he joined the Oklahoma Thunder during his sophomore year of college that he devoted himself seriously to the game. As a freshman, he explained, he was “a screwup.” But “when football came to my doorstep,” he said, “it was my chance to make everyone proud of me. I remember thinking, ‘an opportunity has arisen for me to shine at what I’m good at, so let me use my gifts to pursue that.’ It felt like I was moving to a bigger goal.” He trained hard every day and, as he got stronger and faster, felt that his life was finally moving in a positive direction. After he played with the Thunder for two seasons, a coach at a college in Missouri called him, hoping to recruit him to play for the school’s team.

  Three weeks later, he injured his spinal cord.

  In the days following his surgery, Emeka did not fully grasp the gravity of his situation. He thought he would spend two months in rehab before he could start playing football again. But by month three, when the hospital sent him home, Emeka still could not use his hands and arms, let alone move his legs—and that was when he realized that he was on a journey that would be much longer and more difficult than he had anticipated. “You are supposed to be in the hospital because you are sick,” Emeka said. “When they tell you it’s time to go home, it’s because you’re better. But when they told me it’s time for me to go home, I didn’t look or feel better.” He thought, “What do you mean I’m ready to go?” The guy who had been able to lift 300 pounds couldn’t even lift a 3-pound weight. His father had to move to Tulsa from Georgia to take care of him.