For most of my years on earth I’ve watched a world slowly coming together. Now, for more than a decade, I’ve been watching a world rapidly falling falling apart.
It’s been rattling to experience my perspective on the world blow up. How, I ask myself, can the same world appear so different?
But then again, isn’t it true that life is kind of that way?
When I was a young boy there was a ritual that took place in our home on Monday mornings.
All five of the children would stand in front of our living room window and wave to Dad as he drove off in the car to begin another business trip.
He was likely to be gone for a week or two.
This “waving at Dad leaving ritual” was bookended by “hugging when Dad returned.”
- The yin, in Dad leaving, was matched, in the yang, of Dad returning.
- The promise in Dad leaving matched by the reward of Dad returning.
I knew when Dad left Monday morning he’d come back by Friday.
That was, until he didn’t.
- He left July 8, 1962.
- He died on July 12.
My perspective on life changed that day. Our little family, left hanging by a thread, reformed itself around the realization that life offered no certainties and we needed to support — one another.
It seems now great uncertainty has been set upon the nation. Our collective foundational, constitutional principles are under full scale attack. We need to now rally around each other to preserve our larger family.
To do that we it helps to understand just what it will take to survive.
For that we can be reminded of one of the great stories of human survival — the story of Victor Frankl, Holocaust survivor.
He wrote about it in his book Man’s Search for Meaning.
In1943 the Nazis came for him, his wife, Tilly Frankl, and his mother. They were shipped off to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
His mother was immediately sent to the gas chamber and his wife was sent to another camp, Bergen-Belsen, were she soon died.
Frankl then was sent to Camp Dachau in Bavaria where, he said, he was left with one question:
WHY CONTINUE LIVING?
It was there in Dachau, at a time when all meaning to his life had been stripped away, where his world had completely fallen apart, that he developed a new perspective and with it a way to bring his world back together.
He found three quiet truths on which to anchor himself to this world.
Purpose: It would be the composition of his book, the handwritten paragraphs on scraps of paper, that would ultimately become one of the great texts on how to survive the hardest of hard times. Man’s Search For Meaning has brought many a despairing soul back from the brink. He said that even in his darkest moments, shivering with fever, he would scribble his notes in a wooden bunk. He knew his story had purpose — a purpose that sustained him.
Love: He said it was the enduring love for his wife Tilly that kept him in touch with his own humanity. Even in death she was there with him. He held onto the thought of her with fierce tenaciousness. He spoke to her unceasingly from the sanctuary of his own heart, a place no one or no thing could ever breach. It was, he said, stronger than death.
Agency: Frankl never relinquished, not even for a minute, the power of his own decision. He called this the last of the human freedoms. Even in an environment designed to strip away every shred of physical choice, control, and dignity, Frankl realized that no external force could reach inside a person’s mind to command their inner response. Amazingly, he chose
- grace over bitterness,
- dignity over despair, and
- purpose over surrender.
Circumstances did not dictate the state of his soul.
So I ask myself: now that once again my world has been blown to smithereens — which world will I choose to live in?
- Will I choose purpose?
- Will I choose love?
- Will I choose agency?
Not simple questions.
Will I choose the perspective that my world is falling apart or coming together?
Whose faces will I see when I contemplate my answer?
Well, there you have it.
I see a world — coming together.
Just a thought…
Pat
💐
A little music to capture the moment —
“Top of the World” ~ The Carpenters