I’ve been reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning this week.  Profound book.  The first half is the author’s story of survival in Nazi concentration camps.  The second is a more explicit description of an approach to psychotherapy (logotherapy) the author developed because of his death-camp experiences (he was a psychiatrist before and after the war).

I’ve spent a lot of energy in my life searching for meaning, so not surprisingly, I’m enjoying the book.  And particularly since it’s so indelibly shaped by suffering.  I’m deeply moved and heartened by those who have walked through hell and found (or been given) a way to actually come out on the other side…those whose wisdom and grace and inner quietness reflect that journey.  Frankl is truly a gift.

One of the observations he makes about the human quest for meaning (a quest he thinks all of us are on) is that there is no “meaning of life” that’s universally true.  He says, “To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion:  ‘Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?’  There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one’s opponent.  The same holds for human existence.”

To find the meaning of life, he says, think of the question the other way around:  what if instead of asking the question of life (or books/philosophers/friends/nature/religion/etc., in other words, things outside yourself), you take it as a question that life is asking you.  What is the meaning of your life?

I suppose one might get all uptight at that thought, feeling pressure to give a respectable answer.  I can imagine conjuring up the image of a stern, white-haired god, calling us to account. 

But what if the question doesn’t have to be asked with judgment or sternness at all?  What if the question is more playful, more artful than that?  What if it’s asking that you notice what’s growing in the garden that is you.  What seeds have been planted there?  What’s tended or left wild?  What might be time to prune?  Maybe these are the meaning of life.  For you.  Right now.  And possibly into the future.  Whether what’s growing there is plump with fruit or quiet in a winter dormancy, it’s there.

I cannot know all my life will grow or mean, but by the end of it, I’d love to look back and see a pattern of awakening.  A pattern of learning to love self and others well.  A pattern of rich engagement with people and emotions.  I want to see reverberations of a woman becoming more comfortable in her own skin – ripples into other lives, where because of that process going on in me, others feel it happening in themselves, too.  I want to tend the garden of a healer, a namer, a noticer and celebrator of beautiful things.  Things that call courage and hope into being.  I want to walk gently with fellow souls.  These are what I want to conspire with in that swirl of plants and sun and rain and seasons that is me.  That is me in this world.  Today.

If all of this is the meaning of life, of my life, I think my existential angst might be pacified.  If this is the meaning of life, life makes me smile, and want to throw my arms around it all.

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