Playing devils advocate I’m going to disagree and argue that the search for meaning and purpose is a skill we are really bad at and so the source of much suffering. The key word in that statement was search. My argument being that we don’t need to seek out meaning or purpose to be happy or have hope. We can though open the door, and leave it open, to the experiences.

Seeking implies something we don’t yet have thus the search starts and often remains stuck in the feeling of loss and less then. Begging the question when does a seeker become a finder and get to be content? (Not easily in this consumerist digital world of 1 or 0)

I suspect like joy and happiness meaning and purposes are experiences that happen and not something one ‘finds’. In such a state of awareness every breath is full of meaning and purpose.

I think it comes down to perspective and a cessation of measurement.

From one perspective the sun rises and sets once a day. By the rising and setting we measure out time and the various dualities  of life like meaning and purpose.

Yet from another perspective, the sun is always rising and setting in every moment. (right this moment the sun is being experienced as rising and setting.) Setting in this perspective notice how time, measurement, language and duality begin to fade, and with that fading notions of meaning and purpose.

Then from yet another perspective the sun neither rises or sets, it is. Sitting in such awareness all returns to the eternal and everything is connected. The present moment no longer a measurement of time but the eternal absolute. Eternity not a measurement of time but the source from which time arises and returns.

The experience of movement creates time and space, the play ground of the experience of life and duality. The experience of stillness is eternity, and non-duality (non-measurement).
Each breath each moment contains both the temporal and the eternal experience.

All movement arises from and returns to stillness, all time arises from and returns to eternity, all life arises from and returns to Love. Nothing is Lost nothing Gain, It is, you are… the purpose and meaning you have been looking for.  The task of living  is to be awake to the experience of both

The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Realizing the relationship of the temporal moment to the eternal—not moment, but forever—is the sense of life. Realizing how this moment in your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience—this is the ‘knowing’ experience.- Campbell

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality.

We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. – Alan Watts

Stillness is what creates love, Movement is what creates life, To be still, Yet still moving – That is everything!
Do Hyun Choe

The Sphinx spoke only once, and the Sphinx said, “A grain of sand is a desert, and a desert is a grain of sand; and now let us all be silent again.” I heard the Sphinx, but I did not understand. – Sand and Foam by Kahlil Gibran