When Does Meaning Enter Your Life?

I'm still unpacking my stuff from our move. Also, wife kitteh's needs and desires have come first in the white supremacist, patriarchal tyranny that is our household, so I've not had much time to blog. I've also been playing in the kitchen with my free time, so that's consumed blogging energy as well.

Anywho, here's today's question: When does meaning enter your life?

If you get to define the meaning of life for yourself, what is the meaning of life at age 2? Is it simply bodily needs? From the Pride parade excerpts I've seen, that would appear to carry through to old age for some people.

Do your parents define the meaning of your life until a certain age? When is that? If someone other than you can define the meaning of your life at some point, why not at all points? Do the rest of us get a say in any of it?

Is it discovered or invented?

That's the real conundrum I've been pondering. You are born small, wet and ignorant. You move on from there. You didn't create anything in the world. It existed and then you entered it. The meaning of life, then is made up of components that you did not create. Did life not have meaning before you arrived? What was that?

It seems to me that the meaning of life is discovered as it is created from discoverable things that existed before you.

Wouldn't that indicate that a community of people has a discoverable and not invented purpose as well and that part of your purpose is to fit into it? The world is not tabula rasa until you arrive. You show up in a stream of humanity, a stream that travels through time. 

My off-the-top-of-my-head conclusion is that meaning is discovered and existed before us. That's a very Catholic answer, but it seems to fit all the facts.

"I loved you from the moment you were created," says the mom. Does that not give this tiny life meaning?