Second winter is upon us in New York. Last week we had five or six bright sunny days back to back. The sky so blue and the sun so bright that I felt drunk. The persistent grayness of the season has a way of making me feel as if I don’t exist at all.
This time of year, on the outside, might seem like a terrible time to listen to a man recount his days and his mental anguish at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but it hasn’t been. I think I can often make my life out to be worse than it is. Many times it may be shrouded in boredom or laziness, but it is never bad.
I have never been to a concentration camp, but in all the books I have read on the subject, they always sound like winter to me–gray, barren, cold, and empty places even when filled with men and women. It sounds like being isolated from the life they knew before, isolated from the world, from other ethnic groups and cultures, isolated from friendship, and even from themselves.
In Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” I was intrigued by how a man could find meaning in the harshest of places. I thought about if I would have that sort of strength if placed in the same situation. I am not sure how I would fare. I’m not sure any of us could know that about ourselves. In this book, he told about how he not only was able to find meaning for himself, but at times, was able to help others find their own meaning in a place full of suffering.
I am not finished with the book, only about an hour left to listen, but yesterday as I was walking in the cold wind at work, Frankl spoke about what it takes to return from such an ordeal. He said that there is a bitterness that happens after liberation and return to the world a person lived in before. That for many, they never get past this place and find the meaning in life again.
Frankl said that a person finds meaning in life in several ways. We could do a task or have an experience. These create goals and thus give us meaning. We could meet new people and have interactions. Every person we meet can give us meaning especially if we find we can love this person. He said love is a powerful path to meaning because when you love a person, even outside of romantic love, you see that person for who they really are. You can find the potential in them that they might not recognize in themselves. This love will help you show that person their potential and they will begin to learn it and build themselves into the person they may have not expected they could be.
This idea struck me deeply. I have quietly always been able to see the potential in people and I do try to help them find it, but often this is met with defensiveness or a person’s inability to see what I see in them. I have had to back away so many times in my life from people like this because they feel I do not accept them for who they are. It is hard to explain to someone that you can see beyond what is presented.
Frankl also spoke about suffering. Without suffering, we do not know how good our lives were or can be. I am not one that likes to see other people suffering, but I do recognize that the biggest and most wonderful things in my life came after suffering. It brings about realizations and allows for contemplation of the soul.
What I found most interesting is that Frankl suggested that if you have an irreversible suffering, something that cannot be changed, then you have to dig to find meaning in it. One of the examples he gave was that a elderly man was suffering because his wife had passed away several years before and he was distraught and depressed in this grief. Frankl asked the man how his wife would have felt if he was the one who passed first. The man told him that she would have suffered horribly and it would have been a burden. Frankl told the man that he had saved his wife from every having to feel this suffering or carry the burden of it. The man then had meaning inside his suffering. He had the knowledge that he had saved someone he loved most, the pain of what he himself was feeling.
How many times have we suffered something like this and been drown in the sadness? I wish I would have known this earlier in life when I lost my family. I can look at it now and say yes, had my parents lived to be older, they would have suffered every day in their sicknesses. It would not have been filled with quality and each of them may have hung on to life just to keep the rest of us from feeling bad. I can rest knowing my mother passed in her sleep. She never felt it and the suffering she endured while she was living had ceased.
Right before I turned the audiobook off for the night, Frankl spoke about how if there is a way to alleviate the suffering than one should attempt to do this. We have to get to the root of what makes us suffer and set it free. In previous blogs I have spoken about the trauma work I have been doing and I really believe this is what Frankl is talking about. I let that abuse sit in the bottom of my soul for over 40 years until I often felt unrecognizable, but when I dug that pain out and examined it, I determined it had no more power over me. I made that choice to stop suffering because of it. This is a freedom that I have never felt before and though I am now over 50, I still feel like I can create the life I was always meant to have.
I haven’t finished the book, but I do recommend it. Learn some things about yourself. Challenge your mind and your heart in the ways that you think about what gives you meaning in life. You won’t regret it.
Be kind to each other. Read. Write. Paint. Laugh all the time. You get this one chance. Thanks for reading.
Aleathia
Aleathia Drehmer 