These are dark days, with death and destruction ravaging the Middle East and threatening to spread. So many people feel helpless and hopeless. But often it helps to know how someone in another horrific era managed to survive and even grow. Weeks ago I reached for a book I’d never gotten around to reading. It was a random choice, for I didn’t know what headlines were about to explode, but I couldn’t have found a more apt and inspiring book. It was Viktor Frankl’s classic, ”Man’s Search For Meaning.”
A Holocaust survivor, Frankl endured three years in concentration camps, suffering starvation, beatings, and – hardest – no way of knowing if his family was still alive. When he was finally liiberated he learned that his wife, parents and brother had been killed by the Nazis. (A sister escaped to Australia.)
What kept Frankl from being defeated by despair? How do any of us go on when the loss of even one beloved person can be unbearable? For him, the answer was the book he’d been writing before he was captured. The guards had destroyed his only manuscript, but Frankl refused to accept the loss of his work. In the darkened camp at night, he secretly scribbled notes on scraps of paper, that might enable him to reconstruct his book if he survived. Years later he was convinced that writing those notes saved him, for it gave “meaning” to his life. Frankl managed to rewrite his book and go on to write many others, spreading his belief in the necessity for everyone to create a personal meaning.
His story reminded me of a woman I’d interviewed whose sole remaining siiblling had died. Depressed, she wanted to hide under the blankets. Then she decided to plan a commitment for each day that would include something or someone important to her. “Having a purpose enabled me to get out of bed each morning,”
I discovered this for myself after my husband died. At first the empty evenings and weekends were like black holes in the universe. But after several months I began to write about my husband’s valiant fight, our joint struggle to keep some hope, and at last my faltering steps toward a new life as a single woman. I wrote this as a journal, with no belief it would ever be read. What saved me wasn’t the ultimate publication of “Widow’s Walk,” but the hours writing it when I was so involved I forgot how lonely I was. There was something I needed to do.
Of course, meaning doesn’t have to be writing a book or creating something huge. Frankl stressed that what’s meaningful is different for each person. It varies not only from one individual to another, but from one day to the next! These turbulent times there are countless choices, from becoming involved in a global cause, to helping an elderly neighbor. What they have in common is the ability to direct your life. It’s what Frankl called “the last of the human freedoms.”
When everything else has been taken from us, he said, we still have the right to choose our “attitude” toward the circumstances nd “the right to choose our own way.”
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