Re-reading a book is like dating an ex-girlfriend; some things change, some stay the same, and it is on that higher level, the meta-ness of the whole thing, where you really learn and grow. While re-reading Man’s Search for Meaning, I came across a few pages that were so powerful I was unable to move past them. The ideas aren’t new, but I had forgotten them, and clearly when I first read them, they made no impression on me. To extend the analogy, it’s like falling in love for different and perhaps more spiritual reasons.
Specifically I am talking about pages 76-78 of the Kindle edition. Within, Viktor Frankl – the renowned psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor – explains why we should stop questioning life, and allow life to question us instead.
“We had to learn ourselves…that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consistent, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.”
To find the right action and conduct for yourself:
“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
The central, perhaps only, strategy is to live not for yourself but for something and someone else:
“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.”
This book amazes me every time. It’s an easy read, a powerful story, and a potent philosophy.
“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how” – Nietzsche