There comes a point when a story we’ve depended on stops working.
It might happen after a death, an illness, a personal loss, or a change we never expected. Sometimes there is no single event. We simply notice that a belief no longer comforts us, a ritual feels empty, or the identity we’ve lived inside no longer fits.
That experience is at the center of Chapter 8 of Glass Bones, “When Meaning Breaks.”
In the earlier chapters, I explore how we build worldviews to give our lives coherence and help us live with the knowledge that we will die. Those structures matter. They connect us to other people, give us a sense of continuity, and help us decide what is worth doing. But they are not permanent. Life eventually confronts us with experiences that our familiar explanations cannot contain.
When that happens, we may feel more than disappointment or confusion. We may feel exposed. The stories that helped keep mortality at a manageable distance have weakened, and questions we thought we had settled return with new force.
What do we do when the old meaning no longer holds?
One response is to cling to it more tightly. We try to recover certainty by defending a belief or identity that has already begun to fail us. Another response is despair: the conclusion that if our old story was fragile, perhaps nothing matters at all.
I’m interested in a third response. We can begin to make meaning again.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Albert Camus, and Peter Wessel Zapffe approach the difficulty of being conscious from different directions. Schopenhauer takes suffering seriously and considers how art can briefly release us from its grip. Camus describes the absurd: our longing for an explanation meeting a world that offers no final answer. His response is to keep living, choosing, caring, and creating without guarantees. Zapffe sees human self-awareness as an overwhelming burden, but identifies sublimation as one way to give difficult awareness a form we can bear.
I don’t read these thinkers as offering the same solution. Their differences matter. What interests me is the question running through them: how can we remain present to life when we can no longer rely on an explanation that makes everything feel secure?
My studio is where that question becomes practical.
I know the feeling of watching a wet collodion image emerge in the fixer. I know what it is to work on a painting for months before something I’ve been unable to articulate begins to take shape. Certain photographs, paintings, and clay figures have felt like slow acts of mourning. They do not resolve a loss. They give me a way to attend to it.
Art cannot make a temporary life permanent. It cannot guarantee that suffering will be redeemed or that every rupture will lead to something beautiful. But making can change our relationship to what has happened. It allows us to work with an experience rather than only defend ourselves against it.
Repair also happens beyond the studio. Grief reminds us that we need other people. Shared rituals, memories, and the simple act of witnessing someone’s loss can help us begin to find our footing. Meaning is not always something we can rebuild alone.
The distinction I keep returning to is this: repair is not the same as restoration.
Restoration would mean putting the old story back exactly as it was, as though nothing had happened. Repair asks whether we can build a way of living that makes room for what we now know. It asks for honesty about uncertainty, imagination about what might come next, and the willingness to remain engaged with a life we cannot fully control.
That is not a promise that everything will turn out well. It is a way of responding without demanding that life first provide a guarantee.
In this new reading, I explore what happens when meaning breaks and why creativity can become part of the search for repair.
The question is not how to make ourselves unbreakable. It’s about how to keep living, caring, and making when we discover that we are not.