Meaning Is What We Make: A Tribute to Young People

The young people in my life do practical things and that makes me very proud.

It also makes me think about how, perhaps, a younger generation is re-embracing the making and doing of useful stuff rather than getting in the grips of the digital vortex of modern life.

Indeed, having spent most of my life right where I am right now — tapping away at a keyboard and trying to create some semblance of reality from the abstract — I admire those people who produce direct results in the real world. They can stand back and say: I made that difference. I’m not sure that my thousands of memos, reports and emails – all finely crafted – have.

Here are four young, cool and “doing” humans who am I related to by chance if not genetics.

My son has been a world-class, long-distance trekker and bike mechanic for 10 years, and is now finalising his re-training as a nurse. The latter includes practical placements in kids’ healthcare at a major western Sydney hospital. He brings true utility and kindness to the world.

My daughter shifted from a well-paying role in property development to learn everything about flowers from literally the ground up, eg, from flower farms to 4am flower markets at Flemington to suburban florist shops to collaborating with world-renown floral designers. Hers is a successful floristry career. She brings joy, connection and beauty to the world.

My son’s partner is a schoolteacher. Last week, in addition to “teaching”, she introduced migrant kids who live in high-rise apartments in western Sydney to the delight of using a hose on your veggie patch. Curriculum meets caring.

My daughter’s partner is a rehab physiotherapist. He puts older people with reconstructed titanium knees and hips literally back on their feet. High-tech meets humanity.

I’m self-conscious about the order that I’ve listed them in because each does such useful things that are so beyond what I am capable of. And, I don’t want to inadvertently diminish any of their efforts through my keyboard clumsiness. They are too nice to tell me otherwise, and so I’m very lucky that way too.

Broadly speaking, maybe, these young people are part of what’s sometimes referred to as DIY (Do-It-Yourself) Culture by some commentators in the US especially. The core idea is that, in response to globalism and digitisation and corporatisation, some people choose to do things themselves. They exert one’s agency with one’s hands and actions in the face of a context that sometimes seems stacked against independent and meaningful choices.

(We haven’t called it DIY culture or similar in Australia, but have a look at our commitment to home renovations and cooking — even if vicariously on our TV screens.)

For me, that’s the core: the making of meaning.

In his brilliant and widely shared commencement address to the University of Western Australia some years ago, Australian one-man arts whirlwind Tim Minchin said:

“Let me assure you. There is [no meaning]. Don’t go looking for it. Searching for meaning is like searching for a rhyme scheme in a cook book. You won’t find it and it will bugger up your soufflé… However, I am no nihilist or cynic…There’s only one sensible thing to do with this empty existence. And, that is fill it…. It’s an incredibly exciting thing this one meaningless life of yours.”

Here’s the link and it’s really worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoEezZD71sc

I’ve probably shared Tim’s speech before and that’s just further proof of my very real limitiations. I re-watch it regularly (and what is it about awesome Tim’s from Western Australia or western Sydney). It was a bond I shared with a truly dear friend who has left us for another place and who was very good at precisely making meaning — through her Ukrainian folkloric music on the “bandura” and through her boundless hospitality. The latter included supplying home-baked chicken to the young pro-democracy protestors on Ukraine’s revolutionary Maidan. Hers was an act of both remarkable simplicity and courage — and she blanched at the notion of the remarkable.

So, as I enter this next week of lockdown — something I can’t stop myself from resenting for reasons of both logic and love, both head and heart, both empathy and ego — as a man who very much feels older every day, I consider the making of meaning, as I see it so wonderfully done around me by the young.

My realistic chances to retile a roof, or to sculpt grizzly bears from fallen logs with a chainsaw, or rewire an old short-wave radio, are probably behind me. But, perhaps, in front of me are still some gentler and hopefully grace-filled contributions to this planet and the people I share it with.

· Learning the names of the stars to teach to a grandchild; and, in remembrance of a late buddy (taken too soon by cancer) who only needed a telescope to be happy.

· Mastering and sharing the potato pancakes that my own dad conjured in a tiny kitchen; the language of love of a man with a battered past.

· Taking photographs that give people something else to see and wonder about; cameras are curiousity manifest.

· Making a kite and flying it at the beach with local kids; a string, a paper frame, and prayer cast toward an abundant blue sky and its own Maker.

That it shall be so. That I should take inspiration from the young makers that make my own life very special.