Never Alone

    Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself, and by so doing change himself. He may turn a personal tragedy into a triumph, seeing it as a growth experience “the defiant power of the human spirit”.  Is this to say that suffering is indispensable to the discovery of meaning?  In no way.  If it is avoidable, the meaningful thing to do is to remove its cause, for unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic.  If, on the other hand, one cannot change a situation that causes his suffering, he can still choose his attitude.    ~Viktor Frankl

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   Dr. Vilktor Frankl, psychiatrist and  philosopher, was a prisoner in a concentration camp in World War II in 1942. 
He survived the Nazi  death camps and later wrote:


     Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. It is this spiritual freedom that  makes life meaningful and purposeful. 
          For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets - that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. 
       In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot  express himself in a positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings - in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. The salvation of man is in love and through love.
                  That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining 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. 
                                                       ~Viktor Frankl, from Man's Search For Meaning, Part 1


  The song below offers  a sense of hope and an understanding that love is as strong as death.
   
                                            Never Alone  Lady Antebellum


How does a human being go about finding meaning?  All we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately human life is about as against those who have not.