STOP WAITING FOR THE DUST TO SETTLE: THE CASE FOR CONCURRENT MEANING-MAKING

Suffering doesn't exclude meaning; it embraces it.

Have you ever found yourself smashing into a new problem while you’re still fighting the monsters of the last one?

Have you ever found yourself smashing into a new problem while you’re still fighting the monsters of the last one?

One minute you’re dealing with a major crisis at work; the next, the doctor gives you an unwelcome diagnosis, all while your kid drops out of university to go find herself in Outer Mongolia, and your spouse is dropping hints about couples therapy.

You’ve read the books. You’ve heard the advice: Take time. Find your footing. Wait for the dust to settle. Process this before you take on the next thing.

The advice is well-intentioned, and in the right circumstances, it is sound. The trouble is that for many of us, suffering doesn’t arrive in discrete, tidy episodes, giving you ample time to navigate your way through it, pick yourself up, find the meaning, and move on. Suffering doesn’t take turns. It’s uncoordinated and comes at you from all angles.

There is a version of the transformation story that almost everyone tells. It goes like this: A person suffers. They endure. Something shifts. They emerge, and from the other side, they make sense of what happened to them. The suffering was the raw material. The meaning came afterwards, and now they are wiser and more themselves.

I lived inside that story for years before I understood what was actually happening.

From September 2008 up until very recently, I was trying to navigate a protracted divorce, a near-fatal professional burnout, a business rescue of a long-established family enterprise, and the adolescence of two sons.

None of these waited for the others. They were concurrent. They did not arrange themselves into a sequence that I could process one at a time. And in all of these, there were the enormous emotional, psychological, relational, and financial burdens I also needed to navigate.

There was no ‘taking time’. No dust was going to settle. There was no ‘after’ that was going to arrive on the other side of a particular threshold. There was only the unrelenting ‘now’, in which every crisis demanded my full attention on the same day, sometimes in the same hour, while I had to draw from a single inner reserve that was rapidly being depleted.

The first moment of clarity came when I realised that I couldn’t wait for the right time. The right time was not coming. The only time available was the ‘now’ I was actually inside.

Am I doing this wrong, or is the conventional advice failing me?

If your suffering is concurrent rather than sequential, the conventional advice is not designed for you. The conventional transformation narrative implies a neat sequence:

1.    Suffering

2.    Recovery

3.    Meaning

4.    Resumption of ordinary life

Each phase supposedly follows the last, and each is complete before the next begins. The recovery literature is built on this assumption. The therapeutic frameworks rest on it. And the well-meaning advice from friends and colleagues presumes it.

The trouble is that this sequence is a literary device, not the reality of how difficulties and suffering actually operate. Real life, for most people, is not a neatly choreographed series of demanding events punctuated by periods of rest and recovery. Life is, more often than not, juggling many demanding things at once, with overlapping timelines, and with zero consideration for your available internal, financial, and emotional resources.

• The divorce doesn’t wait for the business to stabilise.

• The business doesn’t wait for the leader to recover.

• The parent doesn’t wait for the child’s adolescence to pass.

• The child’s adolescence doesn’t wait for anything.

If you’ve been trying to apply conventional, sequential advice to a non-sequential life, you have not been failing the process. The process has been failing you. The advice was designed for a life that isn’t yours.

Understanding that this is structural and not personal is the first piece of useful ground on which you can stand. You are not uniquely incompetent at navigating difficulty. You are inside a kind of suffering for which the conventional architecture was never designed.

Why don’t the difficulties or suffering stop?

They don’t stop because the life that produces them doesn’t stop. The same conditions that generate one difficulty usually generate others. The difficulties interact, compound, and prolong each other in ways that the sequential model completely ignores.

Is meaning even available while this is all still happening?

Viktor Frankl answered this question with an authority that nobody else in the modern philosophical tradition can quite match. His book Man’s Search for Meaning is the testimony of a man who lost his wife, his parents, and his brother to the Nazi camps, who was himself imprisoned in Auschwitz and Dachau, and who emerged to argue that meaning is available even within the most extreme suffering. Not after it. Within it.

Man’s Search for Meaning is not a comfortable book. Frankl identified three distinct avenues through which meaning reveals itself:

• Creative values: What we give to the world through work, creation, and deeds.

• Experiential values: What we give and receive through love, beauty, nature, and genuine encounter with another human being.

• Attitudinal values: The stance we take towards unavoidable suffering — the meaning that becomes accessible precisely when every other avenue is blocked.

The third of these is the one most readers miss the first time they encounter it. It is the most demanding. It says that even when the suffering cannot be removed, even when creative work is stripped away, and experiential possibilities are closed, the stance you choose to take toward your reality is where meaning is made. This is the ultimate freedom.

Not the freedom to escape suffering, but the freedom to choose your response to it. This was the exact wisdom that Nelson Mandela discovered while imprisoned on Robben Island, and that he brought to his Presidency of South Africa upon his release.

Frankl was right. But reading him carefully, I noticed something his framework did not quite name.

These three avenues are presented as distinguishable categories. But in a life under sustained adversity across multiple areas simultaneously, they are also not available in turn. They are demanded all at once, from the same depleted person, on the same day. The creative work must continue while the experiential losses accumulate, all while your attitudinal stance is being tested by both.

There is no sequence. There is only coexistence.

What I came to understand, slowly and at considerable expense, is that meaning is not found after suffering ends. It is forged within suffering, across every area of life, simultaneously, imperfectly, and at great cost. I call this concurrent meaning-making.

Giving it a name doesn’t make it comfortable. It doesn’t make the suffering easier, nor does it justify it. What it does is correct the conventional, and dangerous, misreading of how transformation through adversity actually works. We are told that things will simply be clearer “on the other side.” In my experience, the other side never arrives as a clean beginning. It arrives with baggage: everything that went unprocessed during the crisis.

Deferring the search for meaning during difficult years is a massive mistake. What is not metabolised during suffering does not disappear; it accumulates, and the next wave of difficulty begins with an internal well that is already partially drained. Search for meaning now. Search for it continually.

Is there anything I can actually do, or must I just endure?

The good news is that there is something you can do, and it’s nearly two thousand years older than modern self-help.

Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor, asked a foundational question in his private journal during the second century, a question I have returned to every morning for nearly two decades:

“What is within my control, and what is not?”

When you have a million things to do, limited time, and a finite amount of energy, everything seems vitally important. This question is the most reliable instrument I know for distributing finite attention toward what can be acted upon and releasing what cannot. It is the explicit permission to act decisively on what is yours to handle, and to release, without guilt, what is not.

Without the Stoic discipline, Frankl’s search for meaning can feel like an abstract, lofty insight. It isn’t enough on its own; you still have to get through the day. You still have to choose, hour by hour, what to direct your attention toward. Conversely, without Frankl, the Stoic discipline of control can easily harden into a grim method of mere survival. It tells you how to manage your responses, but it doesn’t tell you why managing them is worth the effort.

Together, Frankl’s search for meaning and the Stoic question of control produce something that neither can offer alone: a daily practice of meaning-awareness under conditions of sustained adversity.

During my heaviest years of concurrent crises, I developed a simple, disciplined journalling routine:

1. The Morning Focus (Stoicism)

   First thing, before the day hits: address the Stoic question in a journal. Clearly draw a line between what can be actively influenced today, actions, choices, boundaries, and what must be surrendered: other people’s reactions, past events, macro-conditions.

2. Engage the Day

   Face the day, directing all available energy exclusively toward the items identified as within direct control.

3. The Evening Reflection (Logotherapy)

   Before sleep: answer Frankl’s question in the same journal. Identify where a creative, experiential, or attitudinal value was realised today, even in the smallest, most imperfect increments.

Those journals are not a record of triumph. They are a record of the practice that made a life-under-construction meaningful and therefore livable. The discipline does not produce serenity; it produces the capacity to keep going while remaining honest about the cost of doing so. That is a far more useful thing.

What does this look like day to day?

From the inside, those seventeen years of concurrent meaning-making did not look like a victory lap. It is not the shiny “before-and-after” photograph that conventional self-help promises. It is the ongoing story of doing the work of several lifetimes across nearly two decades, making meaning where it was possible, losing it where it couldn’t be helped, and returning to the page the following morning because the discipline held.

There came a moment when I understood what this disciplined practice had been making possible. In 2022, I was standing on the sand at the Robberg Nature Reserve, looking out to sea. I was physically positioned somewhere between ongoing legal proceedings and an intense business rescue; internally, I was somewhere between the person I had been and the person I was becoming.

I suddenly realised that I was no longer waiting for the suffering to end before I began to live. I was living and suffering at the same time, imperfectly, expensively, and with far more honesty than I had managed in the years when my life was easy.

If you are reading this from inside a season that has no clean end in sight, a marriage that is dissolving while a parent is dying, while a child is struggling, while your work continues to require everything you have, I am not writing to tell you it will all be alright. I don’t know whether it will be alright.

Neither do you.

What I am writing to tell you is that meaning is not waiting for you on the other side of this landscape. It is available right now, inside the room with you, and the practice of accessing it is the only thing that will reliably remain yours through what is coming.

Where, in the life you are currently inside, is meaning being deferred to a future that isn’t promised? Are you willing to begin searching for it today?