The "Why" of Life

I was conducting a session on Stress Management for an organization. 

 During the break, I saw a participant of the workshop standing near me as if hesitating to talk to me.  He was in his mid thirties and had a peaky and disturbed look on his face.  As if I had not noticed, I kept on going nearer to him , talking to other people. And as I had guessed, one he found me alone, he came up to me and said " Mam, just wanted to tell you that your session is going on very well, but somehow , I don't know why, I can't relate with the things being said  ..I have recently lost my wife ... I don't see any point in going on further with my life ... I have nothing to expect from life anymore ... "

I found it very very disturbing. 

And in the next session of the workshop, I talked about the book by Victor  E Frankl , "Man's Search for Meaning "

Victor Emil Frankl (1905 – 1997) was a Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, devoted his life to studying, understanding and promoting “meaning.” His famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, tells the story of how he survived the Holocaust by finding personal meaning in the experience, which gave him the will to live through it. He went on to later establish a new school of existential therapy called logotherapy, based in the premise that man’s underlying motivator in life is a “will to meaning,” even in the most difficult of circumstances. 

The key lesson's are these :

1. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Frankl and his fellow prisoners had to endure atrocities that many of us cannot even imagine. Prisoners had to survive on one small piece of bread a day and maybe some thin soup. They had to work 20 hours each day, digging and laying railroads and so on. If you looked weak, you were beaten. If you stopped working, you were beaten. And you didn’t get much of a second chance after that. You could be killed for any reason. Frankl talks about one inmate that had a dream that the war would be over on March 30th. He told this to Frankl at the beginning of the month and had hopes that his dream was a premonition that would come true. However, on the 29th, when no sense of an ending was coming, this inmate became ill. On March 31st, Frankl writes that “his prophecy came true and he died”. The war was over for him.

To all outward appearances, he had died of typhus. It wasn’t typhus that had killed him. It was his loss of hope.  On the other hand, there was an inmate who had a small kid waiting for him. He had a purpose to live and he lived. 

2. "Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which a man can aspire"

Frankl himself endured the camps by thinking constantly of his wife who had been separated from him long ago and sent to a female camp. Even in the harshest parts of the day, exhausted, sleep-deprived, overworked, underfed, Frankl found salvation in the love that he had for his wife: "But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imaging it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise"

Frankl learned that love really does conquer all. The sadistic guards could do anything they liked to him. It didn’t matter. He had his loving wife’s image in his mind for company. Love was an antidote to pain.

3. "Suffering too has a meaning"

Frankl argued that we always have the freedom to find meaning through meaningful attitudes even 

in apparently meaningless situations. For example, an elderly, depressed patient who could not 

overcome the loss of his wife was helped by the following conversation with Frankl:

Frankl asked "What would have happened if you had died first, and your wife would have had to  survive you ?"

"Oh," replied the patient, "for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!"

Frankl continued, "You see such a suffering has been spared her; and it is you who have spared her  this suffering; but now, you have to pay for it by surviving her and mourning her." 

The man said no word, but shook Frankl's hand and calmly left his office. 

There are three ‘whys’ that stand out from Frankl’s writing:

·         Love 

·         Work 

·         Dignity in suffering

We have likely heard many people utter these words from a concentration camp prisoner:

 “I have nothing to expect from life anymore”. 

In fact, we have probably uttered these words ourselves.

Many of our own darkest moments look positively radiant when compared to that which POWs like Frankl had to endure .....

So if ever you lose hope, think about Frankl and find the "Why" of your life  and say "Yaay " to life !