Originally written for the Lynn News, Thought for the Day
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist who was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust. He spent three years in the infamous concentration camp, Auschwitz. This experience led him to write a transformative book called Man’s Search for Meaning. The book describes how finding deep meaning in his life, despite the horrors surrounding him, gave him the resilience to survive. Frankl later went on to found a school of psychotherapy called logotherapy, which helped patients transform their psychological suffering through developing a deep sense of meaning. He believed that meaning enhances our spirit and our will, to both survive and thrive. Frankl once said:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
For Frankl his source of meaning whilst in Auschwitz related to the completion of a manuscript that he had started before his internment. Meaning does not need to be anything grand or radical. It is most often related to the capacity of the human heart to care about something that is important to us. It might be about what we do for a living, a close relationship, our creativity, or anything that warms and inspires our heart. Maya Angelou, the Black American poet, political activist and writer, tells us that she suffered a terrible trauma in her childhood which stopped her from speaking from the age of 8 until she was 11. As a Black woman in the pre-Civil Rights era of the U.S., she was well acquainted with the experience of racism and sexism. In one of her most famous and profound poems Still I Rise, she says:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
The poem continues to describe the reasons why Maya will rise from oppression. There is humour in this poem that weaves through the verses:
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
What gives you meaning in your life? Does it make you smile? Do you want to befriend it and hold it close? Whatever it is, your meaning is about your unique and precious self, held safe and nurtured as a citizen of the Cosmos.
Jesus once reassuringly told us:
In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.
The Buddha once advised us:
We are what we think…with our thoughts, we make the world.
Our capacity for thought, reason, reflection, story-telling and creation, borne from both our heart and mind, are our tools for creating meaning. Let our hearts and our thoughts, anchored in a deep and loving respect for ourselves and others, lead us to make deep meaning in our lives.