We all need a place to stand. Somewhere solid enough to hold up under the stress of life. For some, it’s faith. For others, it’s family, or work. For most of us, it’s a shifting mixture of all three.
As a therapist, I’ve come to see that every person who sits across from me is, in one way or another, searching for a place to stand. Some feel the ground is starting to give way under their feet–a tragedy has rocked their family, a relationship has fractured, a core belief is coming apart at the seams. Others have never had a solid place to stand to begin with. Beneath whatever brings them to therapy, there’s almost always a deeper question: What really matters? Where do I stand in the world?
Humans seem to have an innate need for meaning, and I don’t mean some philosophical abstraction, but something lived, something tangible. We want our lives to matter. We want our choices to add up to something. Even when we stop believing in grand religious or political or technological narratives, we don’t stop needing a story to live by, a place to stand in the world.
A sense of meaning is the ground beneath our feet. Without it, we’re adrift.
But that ground isn’t fixed; it shifts as we move through life. The question isn’t whether we stand somewhere, but where exactly that is, and how consciously.
For most of us, meaning begins as something given. We inherit it from our families, communities, and our cultures and traditions. We’re taught what is good, what’s true, who is safe, and who is not to be trusted. That inheritance can be a beautiful thing. It gives us a place to stand in the world, a story of belonging, moral clarity, and hope. It can also be confining, especially when life leads us in directions that no longer fit the story we were given.
At some point, many people realize their inherited stories need to be tested, sometimes even remade. It’s not a betrayal to do this, but a part of growth. The meaning that once held us needs to become meaning we can hold for ourselves.
When inherited stories lose some of their hold, many of us try to build new ones. We pour ourselves into a career, or into an identity, or some ideology that seems to promise a sense of coherence. We set goals, chase success, and craft versions of ourselves that look meaningful from the outside.
This isn’t a shallow sort of meaning-making, it’s creative and often very necessary, but it can become fragile–even a trap. If our place in the world, our sense of meaning and purpose, hinges on achievement or recognition, we can find ourselves in a difficult place with more questions than answers. When the job goes away after a scandal, who am I now? When the kids grow up and the marriage ends, who am I now? Where do I fit in the world when my world has been turned upside down?
Or maybe there is no scandal and the job doesn’t end. Maybe we’ve made the millions and everything looks perfect on paper. And yet, there’s still something that feels so ... empty. Is this all there is? What does it matter? We may have just lost the sense of why we were building something in the first place.
There’s another kind of meaning that emerges. It doesn’t arrive by effort so much as through attention, and it usually comes after some sort of constructed meaning has given way. We’re not usually looking for it either. Maybe you’ve had this feeling before, that even in the pain and the loss something feels more alive in you. It’s a paradox and a cliché at the same time.
The best way out is always through.1
Meaning discovered in this way isn’t really an answer to anything. It’s more of a presence, a sort of peace that shows up when we stop resisting long enough to notice what remains: connection, love, beauty, life. It’s the awareness that even when the story collapses and we find ourselves adrift with no place to stand, something deeper in us–call it love, or awareness, or spirit–still responds to life.
Over time, our footing shifts. The meaning that held us at twenty may not hold us at forty. Parenthood, illness, loss, and the slow passing of years changes the questions we ask. This is often the hardest thing to accept–that the ground itself moves. But it’s the most normal thing in the world. It doesn’t have to be seen as a bad thing. I think this is something like what Rilke meant when he wrote, “live the questions now.”2 It’s certainty–not confusion–that gets us stuck.
In therapy, I picture this process as a spiral rather than a line. We circle back to old questions, but we’re no longer seeing things from the same vantage point. We’ve shifted positions and are standing in a different place. So the questions we ask have changed, and the meaning we derive is different. The goal isn’t to arrive at the “right” answer once and for all, but to stay awake to how meaning unfolds through the life we’re actually living.
When I sit with someone whose sense of meaning and purpose has collapsed, my role isn’t to supply a new one. It’s to help them notice what remains–the fragments of connection, creativity, or faith that still contain life for them. We can trace the outlines of what once held meaning, what still does, and what might come next.
I don’t believe there’s one true place to stand that works for everyone. But I do believe each of us can cultivate a sense of groundedness–a place to stand that feels real, and chosen, and connected to something larger than ourselves. That might be love, or family, or faith, or service. There are lots of good options. It might simply be a conviction that, even in uncertainty, life is still worth showing up for.
Maybe that’s the real work of meaning-making: to stand where we are in all the mess and beauty, all the joys and pains of life, and let that be enough. We don’t need to find the perfect place to stand, but maybe we should learn to pay attention to the ground we’re standing on now, right here, in the only life we have.
Ryan Denney is an associate marriage and family therapist, writer, and software developer AMFT #155800, supervised by Rachel Daggett, MS, LMFT #107858