What's your meaning of life?

I have a theory that we are all searching for the meaning of life and that is the meaning of life: the search. Connecting to something greater than yourself.  A lot of people try to find that meaning in collecting money, shoes or other people and I'm not here to judge their level of success, just to ask how that is working for them.

What is your meaning of life?  What are you trying to connect with and is it working?

I read an interesting take on life's meaning last week and have been pondering it quite a bit.  It went something like: we are not a body, we have a body.  We are a spirit and our body is simply a vehicle for communication so that we can have a human experience.  Further, that the body can't think, that it is our mind that interprets the sensations and gives them (sometimes arbitrary) meanings: good or bad.

What was really interesting to me was how differently everyone interprets the same sensations.  Two people can experience the exact same thing and interpret it very differently.  For example, a roller coaster.  One person can get in it and ride for hours, throwing their hands up and screaming with delight.  Another person can get in with fear in the pit of their stomach, clench the safety bar until their knuckles are bleeding and throw up from the excruciating horror of it, refusing to ever ride again.

There are even studies of infants 4 months old, showing how extremely different each can react to the exact same stimuli so we don't even know exactly when we start to form our perceptions of this world.  So, I'm not going to get into the psychology/biology of it.
What I wonder, is can we learn to change our perception and should we?

Personally, I think if something isn't working for you or you just want to make a positive change, the answer is yes on both counts.  We naturally look for evidence to "prove" our personal beliefs - just look at your friends' Facebook pages, you'll see they are filled with things that support their own view of how the world should be and you'll find exact opposite view points on a different person's page.

So, the challenge is to search out the perspective that supports the meaning you want to bring more of into your life.  You can focus on the good news or the bad news, change or the status quo - which one do you choose?