Viktor Frankl has inspired generations of readers since he first published the seminal Mans Search for Meaning in 1946.
Its a minor miracle this book exists.
She remembers her father saying Thats living at even the slightest pleasures.
They were determined, after all the hells they had endured, to say Yes!
to life, in spite of everything.
The song had bizarre origins.
One camp survivor said of the singing, we put all our hatred into the effort.
But for others some of the lyrics expressed hope, particularly this:
.
That life-affirming credo has also become the title of this book, a message Frankl amplified in these talks.
For me there is a more personal resonance to the theme ofYes to Life.
Happiness in itself does not qualify as such a purpose; pleasures do not give our life meaning.
He even posits that the more difficult, the more meaningful troubles and challenges can be.
How we deal with the tough parts of our lives, he observes, shows who we are.
To be sure, a robust lineage of logotherapy and existential analysis continues to this day.
There are three main ways people find fulfillment of their life meaning, in Frankls view.
In short, our lives take on meaning through our actions, through loving, and through suffering.
Frankl cites a converging formulation from Rabbi Hillel almost two thousand years ago.
The translation I know best goes: If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am not for others, what am I?
And if not now, when?
To be sure, Frankl saw human frailty, too.
Each of us, he notes, is imperfect but imperfect in our own way.
That knowledge could easily turn into a crippling survivors guilt.
Small wonder camp survivors like him had to relearn how to be happy at all.
Fast-forward seven decades or more.
Frankls intuitive sense of how purpose matters has been borne out by a large body of research.
For instance, having a sense of purpose in life offers a buffer against poor health.
People with a life purpose, data shows, tend to live longer.
And researchers find that having a purpose numbers among the pillars of well-being.
Whoever has a why to live can bear almost any how, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared.
Frankl takes this maxim as an explanation for the will to survive he noted in some fellow prisoners.
One crucial fact mattered here.
The hopes, imagination, and dreams of prisoners were up to them, despite their awful circumstances.
Fate is what happens to us beyond our control.
But we each are responsible for how we relate to those events.
What is human, he argued, is still valid.
One student guessed it exactly: to help other people find their purpose.
Excerpted fromYes to Life: In Spite of Everythingby Viktor Frankl.
Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.
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