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- A Human Being Is a Finite Thing
Full moon is falling through the sky. Cranes fly through clouds. Wolves howl. I cannot find rest Because I am powerless To amend a broken world.
Man’s Search For Meaning
Today I’d like to share a book with you, as a preface to a story I have planned for next week. That book is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. Have you heard of it?
Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who spent three years in four concentration camps, between 1942 and his liberation in the spring of 1945. In those years he lost his wife, his mother, his father, his brother. It was in 1946 that he wrote Man’s Search For Meaning, though it wasn’t released in English under that title until 1959. His book is a powerful and moving account of one man's search for meaning and purpose in the face of the most unimaginable suffering.
“To be sure, a human being is a finite thing”
Frankl was a practicing psychiatrist before the war, and was already on a journey toward the specialty he eventually pioneered, which he called “logotherapy.” Logotherapy is about finding meaning, and has three main points:
Meaning is not the same as happiness
Meaning is not static—it evolves and changes with time and experience
Meaning can be found in the present moment, not in the past or the future
And Frankl is clear that each of us has the potential to find meaning only we can find, since each of us is unique, and finite. Whatever the phase or circumstances we find ourselves in, no one else can experience our lives for us.
And it’s our responsibility to experience our lives!
In his view, there are three main ways of doing that:
by making a difference in the world—regardless of size
by having particular experiences of things like art, love, or nature
by adopting particular attitudes
Even if we are, like the opening quote above, powerless to amend a broken world, we have a choice in how we experience it.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Meaning is always evolving
We can find meaning in art, in music, in love. In nature, always. It is there, if we look. In each present moment. And it isn’t just about the things we do, but about the unique and finite person we choose to be. The important thing is that as we evolve, so should the meaning we find: there is no single point of arrival, no single meaning.
This is why one of the best ways to find meaning is through service—because it’s not something done just once, but a way of approaching life. Frankl writes:
. . . being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.
Art, nature, love. Service. Even suffering. These are things that, past a certain age, we know can bring meaning and purpose to life. That much is no mystery. But the reminder that we can choose how to pursue and experience those things—even the very hard things—and that it’s the choice that leads us to meaning, is powerful.
Next week will be a bit more on Frankl, and how his words were a needed reminder for me during a beautiful weekend in isolation, at the start of COVID lockdowns in 2020.
In the meantime, if you’d like to check out Man’s Search For Meaning you can find it here on Amazon.