Finding meaning in suffering

what can never be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end.

(Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946)

Today’s post is neither easy nor cheerful, although I hope it may be comforting in some way. It deals with the third of Viktor Frankl’s sources of meaning for our lives – suffering. It draws on his lowest times in the concentration camps, when the opportunity to find meaning in creating or  experiencing seemed to have disappeared for him and other inmates. What kept  them from despair was finding a meaning in their suffering:

For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying. 

I could connect Frankl’s ideas to watching people in my life go through suffering and death, how the way they faced this gave them a meaning and gave those of us who witnessed it new possibilities for how to respond and behave. But I feel that it is important today to quote the moving words of Frankl himself*, describing how he faced suffering in Auschwitz and how he later developed a psychotherapy with meaning at its core. In forthcoming posts, I will connect these ideas to how the poetic can offer meaning for our lives at times of disruptive change and the choices we can make at different points of our lives.

 If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

original painting by Lynne Cameron No one sees it all (After Nolde)

the hopelessness of the struggle did not detract from its dignity and its meaning

When a person finds that it is their destiny to suffer, they will have to accept their suffering as their task; their single and unique task.

Suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn our backs.

human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning, and that this infinite meaning of life includes suffering and dying, privation and death…

what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. When we are no longer able to change a situation … we are challenged to change ourselves.

* I have updated generic pronouns in the translation of Frankl’s text from he, him, his to the more inclusive they, them, their