Can you do something meaningful in a situation that is completely out of your control?
Starting from the assumption that people want their lives to have meaning, Frankl asks: Where can we look to find possibilities for giving life meaning? His answer is by doing something meaningful, by experiencing something meaningful that life has to offer or by the way you suffer an unavoidable fate.
While we usually think of suffering as something to “cope” or “deal with” or “endure” that is not the way Frankl phrases it. He writes: “By taking his unavoidable suffering upon himself he may yet realize values.”
He brings two examples. One is a nurse who can no longer work, due to her illness. Another is a man who is inconsolable over the loss of his wife. To the nurse he says, if the worth of the lives of all the sick people you dedicated your life to all those years depended only on their ability to work, are you not being unfair to them now by behaving as if the worth of your life depends on such and such hours a day that you can work, and only that justifies your existence? To the man he asks, “What would have happened if you had died first and your wife had survived you?” The man felt his wife would have suffered terribly, and in this he got his consolation. His sacrifice of having to suffer over the loss of his wife spared her having to suffer over losing him.
In these examples there is an achievement or a sacrifice, in spite of the situations being unavoidable.
How is it possible to achieve when a situation that beyond your control has been thrust upon you? How is it possible to make a meaningful sacrifice when you did not intentionally choose this sacrifice?
To understand this we need to understand that no matter how out-of—your-control the events that happen to you are, you can always choose your attitude, and that by choosing your attitude, while it may seem to you that it is only in your mind, you are doing something meaningful. You are creating a profound change in yourself and in your environment. You change the meaning of what is happening by the way you relate to it.
Furthermore, Frankl talks about the uniqueness of these people’s experience. There is a particular meaning to the nurse not being able to work now, and the message her current situation, borne courageously, has for the value of her patients lives There is a particular meaning to the widower’s sacrifice, because of the value he portrays in his love for his wife.
Each of these people could not have actualized those values of achievement and sacrifice any other way. It wasn’t the same kind of meaning that they experienced in the past, but it was the kind of meaning that they could only discover in the situations they found themselves in now.
This reminds me of the concept of service to God being something personal and unique to every life situation.
Each person is a miniature world unto himself, with special conditions that apply only to his character and soul root…The world he is in constitutes his obligations…at every given moment…Just as there is a commandment to cling to God at a time of spiritual elevation…there is an aspect of clinging to God in a situation of suffering. (Netivot Shalom, Avodat Hashem p. 241)
The :place” we stand in is always changing. Our service to God from one place is not the same as the service from another. The type of service, or relationship varies with the situation, but the relationship stays the same. In fact, finding different ways to connect in the same relationship enriches that relationship.
The values that we can actualize and the meaning we find as a result is never the same. Every single situation offers a unique opportunity for meaning that can be found there, and only there.
(The Doctor and the Soul, pp. xix-xx)