In thirty years of teaching I was asked the meaning of life more times than I can count, usually by fifteen-year-olds at the end of a long afternoon, usually as a way of not doing the exercise in front of them. I had a short answer ready, the one most adults give: it is up to you to give your life its meaning. I gave it for years. I never liked it. It is true as far as it goes, but it is too vague to be any help, and to a young person who is genuinely struggling to know where to start, it can sound a little smug, as if the question were a sign of weakness that a more sensible person would have outgrown.
I have had time since I retired to think of a better one. It is still not a complete answer, because the deeper truth is that the meaning of a life is different for everyone. But it comes, I think, in three ways, and the three are the same for all of us even when their content is not.
To Learn
The reason you are alive is to learn. That will not surprise anyone who knows how I spent my working life. But I mean something more than schooling. The lessons you are here to learn may not be the lessons the people around you are here to learn, and that is exactly why no one can tell you the meaning of your life. Your brother is learning patience; you are learning to speak up. Your friend is learning to let go; you are learning to hold on. Neither of you can do the other's homework.
The Essenes would have understood this. The Community Rule ranked every member according to his understanding and his deeds, and examined him again every year, so that he might rise or fall by what he had learned. It was a school as much as a monastery. The fellowship's teaching of Knowledge, Wisdom, Understanding carries that conviction forward: the way is a way of knowing, not only of believing. And the psalmist asks for the one lesson that underlies all the others: so teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
To Accept
Here is the good news hidden in the first answer. Although each of us has different lessons, everyone has a similar purpose, and the purpose is to learn to accept, and to love. Most people skip the acceptance. It is too hard. They go straight from learning to loving, and wonder why their love keeps curdling into disappointment.
Life will challenge you, sometimes in ways you never expected and would not have chosen. Every one of those challenges is, in the end, an opportunity to choose acceptance over resistance. I do not mean resignation. A teacher who accepted every bad essay would not be doing her job. I mean the refusal to spend your strength demanding that what has already happened be otherwise. The fellowship's teaching of The One Law is, at bottom, a teaching about this: there is an order to things, and the spiritual life is learning to move with its grain rather than against it. The Noon Peace on the seventh day asks the hardest form of the question: where am I still demanding that God be otherwise?
Acceptance is the hinge. Without it, learning becomes bitterness, because you learn what hurts and cannot forgive it. With it, learning becomes wisdom.
To Love
The third way needs the least explaining and the most practice. The teacher of the Way, asked which commandment was greatest, joined two verses of the Law that had stood apart for a thousand years: thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself. The Essenes swore at their entry to piety toward God and justice toward their fellow human beings, and to the love of truth. Every tradition worth the name ends here, sooner or later, however it begins.
What I would add, from a long life, is only this. We do not choose most of the people we are given to love, any more than a teacher chooses her class. But we do choose, every day, the people and the dreams we will go on loving and accepting, and those choices are the shape of a life.
The Meaning Is the Weight
So here is my longer answer, the one I wish I had given those fifteen-year-olds. In the end, the meaning of your life is the weight you feel from what you have learned, and from the people and the dreams you chose to love and to accept along the way. Not what you achieved. Not what you believed, even. The weight.
I have been retired long enough now to notice what remains of thirty years in a classroom. It is not the syllabus. I could not tell you what I taught in most of those years. What remains is a few hundred faces, some of them still writing to me, and the slow knowledge of what each one taught me. That is the weight, and it is not a burden. It is the most solid thing I own.
The ancient witnesses say that the Essenes held the soul to be immortal, and the page on The Soul and Its Journey speaks of where it goes. I do not know all that the soul carries with it when it goes. But if it carries anything, I think it carries this: what it learned, what it accepted, and whom it loved. Learn, accept, love. In that order on most days. In the reverse order on the best ones.