The act of making-sense or understanding is directed primarily not to individual things and to general concepts. Instead, it is alive in one’s firsthand lived world and in one’s world as a whole. In this act of sense-making, the world is opened up for existence. This disclosure is the uncovering of the current form of a being’s suitability-for, whereby it is present as a being. Whatever gets opened up this way can be held on to, even when the worldly thing in question is not itself present. That is, the opening-up of the world—which unfolds in the act of understanding or sense-making—can be possessed and preserved as meaning, i.e., as a world of understanding in which existence operates.
P. 126