Finding the meaning of life even in difficult times

What does it mean to ask ourselves about the meaning of life? It is common to compare life with a path that we take step by step, day by day.. As Antonio Machado wrote, “there is no path, the path is made by walking“.

When we ask ourselves about the meaning of our path, we are asking in which direction to go. “Sense” also means “orientation”: north or south, west or east. Like some roads life sometimes offers us the option of a U-turn.

Naturally, The meaning of lifeIt also refers to the meaning of living: what am I doing here, in this world, in this place, at this moment? (“what do I do?” in the double sense of “what am I doing?” and “what can I do?”). The answer appears, dawns, by walking your own path.

“The secret of happiness lies in the vital attitude”

“We are all born with a powerful and enduring star of light, it is enough to be faithful to it“, writes the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Each human being is unique and unrepeatable. An essential key to life is discover who you are and what life expects of you.

In the thirties of the twentieth century, the psychiatrist Victor Frankl (1905-1997) realized that what ultimately motivates us most is not the thirst for pleasure (as Freud believed) or for power (as Adler thought), but the search for the meaning of one’s life in the great adventure of existence.

Frankl ended up as a specialist in help each one discover the purpose of their living. To the desperate he asked: “Why don’t you commit suicide?”, and based on the answer he would let out what really mattered to that person.

The original title of Viktor Frankl’s classic work, Man’s Search for Meaningactually means: “Despite everything, say yes to life” (Trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen). The meaning of life emerges when we find our own way to say “yes”.

In his work, Frankl explains that “we need a radical change in our attitude towards life”, that allows us to discover what life expects of us. The meaning of life itself, unique and non-transferable, is not something we have to inventbut something that we are discovering every moment and over the years.

Give the best of oneself

Developing an idea already mentioned by Saint Augustine, the poet and philosopher Joan Maragall (1860-1911) distilled the essence of life with these words:

“Love, this is life. Love to the point of being able to give yourself for what you love. Being able to forget yourself, this is being yourself; Being able to die for something, this is living… Love, and do what you want. Love is therefore the cause, the sign and the justification of life… Love your job, your vocation, your star, what you serve, what you really are one among men. Strive in your work as if the salvation of Humanity depended on each detail you think about, each word you say, each piece you put, each blow of your hammer. Because it depends, believe me.” Joan Maragall

The vision of Alice Herz-Sommer

an extraordinary example ability to find meaning in life in adverse circumstances is the one ofpianist Alice Herz-Sommer, died at 110 years of age. She was interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp together with her youngest son, to whom she sometimes had nothing to eat.

Through music he was able to comfort his son. On one occasion she and other musicians played in a room before 150 prisoners, starving and sick. Decades later she recalled: “Music gave them life. It was like food for them”.

His mother was arrested and murdered, and her husband died at Dachau, but his son survived and went on to become a respected cellist and conductor. In an interview that can be viewed on YouTube, 108-year-old Alice Herz-Sommer explained that she continued to play the piano four hours a day, and that the secret of his happiness and longevity lay in his vital attitude:

What is the secret of feeling so good at your age?

-The optimism. And look on the bright side. Life is Beautiful. You have to be happy, to admire, to be grateful, grateful to be alive. Everywhere you look there is beauty.

Why are you so optimistic?

–Because the world is beautiful! Nature is extraordinary! Music is phenomenal stuff!

Do you see beauty everywhere?

-Everywhere. I know there is bad, but I look at the good side.

transcend yourself

Viktor Frankl was also a prisoner in Theresienstadt and in three other concentration camps (including Auschwitz). There he verified how only those who had an ulterior motive for living managed to muster the strength to survive, physically and psychologicallyto those appalling conditions. In the words of Nietzsche: “Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how”.

Many contemporary technologies seem motivated by the tendency to avoid all effort or tension. Instead, Frankl claimed that “what the person needs is not to live without tension, but to make an effort and fight for a goal”.

Example used by the philosopher Immanuel Kant:

The pigeon, in its flight, feels the resistance of the air, and perhaps it would believe that without the resistance of the air it could fly more easily. But it is actually air resistance that allows it to fly. In the same way, life makes sense as navigation between the resistance of the wind and that of the waves: a world that offered no resistance would not be a world.

Frankl pointed out that the lack of meaning, that is, the existential void, is the basic psychopathology of our time. It gives rise to “existential frustration”, the key to numerous depressions, addictions and other psychopathologies.

From Frankl’s perspective, from that lack of meaning derives the insatiable thirst for money and power (with its growing extremes of inequality and financial rapacity today), as well as the disorientation of many adolescents and adults.

It is as if we have to cover the void of meaning based on objects, experiences and acceleration, constantly fleeing from the here and now. But it is only in the here and now where, after all, we can take root in the world and discover what life asks of us.. “I am nothing without you, world”, wrote Jorge Guillén. And, elsewhere:

“With the light, with the air, with the beings

To live is to live in harmony

Pleasure, pain: I am because you are.”

Jorge Guillen.

For Frankl, we are human insofar as we transcend ourselvesabove all in dedication to a personal vocation, to a collective task and in love for other people. “He who only thinks of himself is nobody, he is empty”, wrote Joan Maragall.

Be yourself

abraham maslow (1908-1970), father of humanistic and transpersonal psychology and another great connoisseur of the human soul, explained that in the process of self-realization it is essential to listen to our inner voice: “Discover who you are, what you like, what you don’t like, what is good or bad for you, where you are going and what your mission is”.

Maslow proved that all the people he called self-actualizing were “engaged in some task ‘outside themselves’to some esteemed vocation, task or job”, to which they gave themselves “passionately and disinterestedly”.

Maslow described it as an act of surrender, “in the sense of offering oneself on some altar for some specific task, some cause external to oneself and greater than oneself”.

As Viktor Frankl explained, asking in the abstract: “What is the meaning of life?” It would be like asking a great chess champion: “Master: what is the best move?” The best move depends on each position, as well as the characteristics of the person or situation to which we respond. It depends, like everything, on the context.

“It only looks good with the heart”

To find meaning in one’s life it is essential to get out of the materialistic mentality that reduces reality to what can be quantified and that drives us to see ourselves as objects in a world of objects. The key message of one of the most beautiful works of the 20th century, The little Prince of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, is that “the essential is invisible” And because of that “It only looks good with the heart.”

Far from being simple atoms in a mechanical and meaningless universe, everything we are and do resonates with the whole universe. That is why Gandhi could affirm that “If a single human being wins in spirituality, the whole world wins with him, and if one fails, the whole world fails to the same extent.”

As a last resortwe wonder about the meaning of life because we feel separated from life. When you fully embrace life, the question disappears: everything appears full of meaning here and now and, at the same time, without an ulterior purpose. Like in a game in which you are totally immersed – a cosmic game, the game of the continuous creation of the world. That’s what it’s all about, participating, playing in it.

The new reality: the universe is immaterial

We believed that life and society are based on competition and control, because that is how the world discovered by science seemed to be. In the new reality that cutting-edge science reveals to us the world is not mechanical and impersonal, but holistic and participatory. It is not made of objects but of relationships.

As two Nobel laureates in Physics, Schrödinger and Wigner, have pointed out, scientific evidence suggests that the basis of reality is not matter and energy, but consciousness and perception. Naturethe most rigorous of scientific journals, published in 2005 an article by the physicist RC Henry, which concluded as follows: “The universe is immaterial –mental and spiritual–. Live, and enjoy.”

Bibliography

Victor Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning (Ed. Herder) Abraham Maslow. The creative personality (Ed. Kairos) Lin Yutang. the importance of living (Ed. Edhasa) Jordi Pigem. good crisis (Ed. Kairos)