Finding your why
You must find your why to overcome your suffering
If you’re new around here, welcome to Wisdom Wednesdays Thursday - where I share wisdom from history’s greatest minds.
Lessons from Viktor Frankl
Suffering is the fire that purifies. Is it not conceivable… that precisely this was the meaning of your surviving your children: that you may be purified through these years of suffering, so that finally you, too, though not innocent like your children, may become worthy of joining them in heaven.
The meaning of life exists despite suffering. “My life was no failure!” Viewing her life as if from her deathbed, she had suddenly been able to see a meaning in it, a meaning which even included all of her suffering. By the same token, however, it had become clear as well that a life of short duration, like that, for example, of her dead boy, could be so rich in joy and love that it could contain more meaning than a life lasting eighty years.
I only insist that meaning is possible even in spite of suffering—provided, certainly, that the suffering is unavoidable.
Without love, there’s no meaning. Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
It’s in our world of duality that meaning is forged. By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system.
Be wary of persons who conflate meaning with power or pleasure. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure.
We are called to live virtuously amid our sufferings. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
You can support this mission of reviving beauty and wisdom by leaving a like or upgrading to a paid subscription on Substack.
Thank you to all those who are supporting my work.
Good IJ