"Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning." - Viktor Frankl
We all have our own stories of suffering. We suffer from sickness, injuries, accidents, failures, loneliness, stresses, anxieties, depression, emptiness, boredom, issues in our relationships, death of our loved ones, and the list goes on and on.
I know I am making it so dark in the beginning itself. But please stay with me for the next few minutes!
All those experiences are familiar to us. As human beings, we necessarily have to encounter some level of suffering at some point in our lives. But in the rush to maximize our pleasure, especially in this highly luxury seeking society we live in, I believe that we have forgotten to think about the difficulties that awaits us. We forgot to get ourselves prepared for our difficult times. And when that finally hits us unexpectedly, we lose grip of ourselves completely.
Viktor Frankl is a Holocaust survivor, and also an author, well known for his book "Man's Search for Meaning." After spending three years of his life as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps, understanding all the raw realities of life that suffering revealed to him, he wrote, "Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning." He emphasizes that "human life, under any circumstances, never ceases to have a meaning." In his view, the primary concern of a human being is not to gain pleasure, but rather to see a meaning in one's life. And here, my intent in this writing is to share some of my thoughts and perspectives on finding meaning, or wisdom, from our sufferings.
Whenever we are challenged with any kind of difficult situation in our life, we strive for our recovery or relief from that situation, but we often forget to strive for the meaning that is entailed in those experiences. We underestimate the importance of seeking wisdom from our difficulties. I think it's because of this reason that we are hardly able to appreciate the value added to our life by those sufferings. The patience we built during those difficult experiences, the strength we gained through our perseverance, the courage we showed not to quit, the ego we reduced and the humility we gained, and the quality of empathy we were able to develop; all these things add on to our list of achievements. But why are they not clearly visible to us when we are passing through our tough times in life? What it felt to me is that, along with striving for relief from difficulties, we should also strive for the meaning they carry. By choosing this attitude, you could certainly recognize the potential growth hidden in our tough times, which you haven't counted before. Thus, when someone finally recovers from a state of suffering, he not only returns to his old normal life, but he enters it with so many new lessons learnt and so much growth realized.
But as I have mentioned in the beginning, suffering is a kind of experience which is inevitable in our journey through this life. It will encounter us again and again. So, when it becomes a cyclical process, when it starts to confront you repeatedly, you will realize that what you were searching for was not just meaning from your suffering, but rather it was actually about meaning of your life. And you would see suffering as a phenomenon which is actually a trigger point to remind you of the fragility of your existence and you would realize how important it is to seek meaning in your life.
And to be honest, to remain in that quest, one needs a lot of effort. It's not that easy to find an ultimate meaning of suffering for those who are confronted with life-long agonies. There are children who are born with disabilities. There are people who are struggling with diseases for which medicines and treatments have not yet been formulated. There are people who have suffered with injustice throughout the course of their lives. There are people who have suffered and died due to malnutrition (despite this rich world). How can we continue our search for meaning without addressing them, without addressing the meaning behind all these unanswered sufferings? I know I am causing more trouble for you. But we should not allow that question to puzzle us. We can see it as something that drives us to continue our search for meaning by exploring new dimensions. Let us discuss that in detail in the next part of this writing.
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