I have often thought I would just die if anything happened to my hands. What if I could suddenly no longer create? Or what if something happened to my eyesight? Or my hearing? What if everything I worked for was taken from me and I was forced to live in poverty, stripped bare, unable to defend and feed my children adequately?
Man's Search for Meaning tells me there is another way to view, do and experience such horrible things. According to Frankl, no matter what happens, if I choose to keep them, I can always posses my heart, my spirituality and my imagination. Knowing I can live with these things until I die brings me quite a bit of peace.
"In spite of all the enforced phisical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp,
it was possible for spiritual life to deepen.
Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain
(they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less."
"An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.
But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment
and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior:
namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.
A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him.
But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful.
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.
Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.
Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete."
---Viktor E Frankl
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