Life, Writing, Weirdness

If you don’t recognize the quote, and I’m not sure how widely read the book it comes from might be eighty years after publication, I took it from Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor E. Frankl. It’s a short book, but a tough read for the first half. Not for language or structure, but for content.

I read this book about ten years ago, but my mind comes back to that quote every so often.

Mr. Frankl was an Auschwitz survivor, and that first half talks about his experiences not just there, but in the concentration camps in general (he actually survived four separate camps). But his objective wasn’t an expression of mere survival in one of the camps, but an attempt to convey an understanding daily destruction of human spirit its inmates endured from the moment they passed through its gates until they were freed, one way or another, from that existence.

Frankl makes the argument (and it’s a very good one) that even if everything else is taken away, you still have one fundamental choice, one final freedom that can’t ever be taken away: the freedom to choose your attitude in meeting what the world gives you. He argues that this last inner freedom cannot be lost and that’s what makes life meaningful and purposeful. You choose how you meet life, whatever that life is.

A couple of other things that appear in the writing, and I’ll paraphrase, that have stuck with me:

• What you need to do, and therefore the meaning you’re bringing to life, differs from person to person, and from moment to moment.
• Tears are a sign of strength, and bear witness that someone has the greatest courage, the courage to suffer.
• When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
• No one has the right to do wrong, even if wrong has been done to them.

This last one is the biggest one, and it’s an idea that seems to have completely gotten lost in the world I’m currently living in. It hasn’t, of course, but how things get reported that make it feel that way.

But the quote I started with is the one that sticks in my brain and needs to be turned over and over again while I try to address it. The meaning of life is to give life meaning. At the not-so-tender age of 55, what meaning am I giving to my life?

Be well, everyone.