Reading Tomas’ blog has made me think about adding some stuff about purpose and meaning – our motivations for getting out of bed each day. So much of our happiness depends upon it. I’m writing in the hope my ramble helps someone reading this.
Tomas and I touched on meaning when we last met in Prague. In looking at what purpose and meaning my life has had, I have looked to my experiences, and my behaviour relative to each situation.
It’s become clear to me that the search for meaning is everything. Everything has meaning. Including all the negative aspects, experiences or suffering we all inevitably have to deal with. Because they lead to you where you are now, what you have learnt, who you have become. (Aware now that I sound like Yoda training Luke Skywalker. Sorry). Therefore – it follows that even the bad stuff is useful, if painful at the time you experience it.
Viktor Frankl expresses this far more eloquently than I ever could in his book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning.’ (And hey – Viktor would approve of Tomas’s Mercurious site without doubt!). Frankl was a WW2 concentration camp survivor, who felt he owed his survival to the attitude he chose to take to his experience. The Nazi’s could take all from him but the attitude he chose to his fate. This was ultimately empowering for him and changed his mentality from being a victim of cruelty and happenstance to someone who had hope, who did not act like a victim, appeared to the Nazi’s as someone able to endure the terrible rigours of a work-camp, and was therefore not gassed. He had something to live for. (But I should add he had ultimate admiration for those unfortunate people who died there – many of whom chose to die with dignity – in choosing their attitude to death, they robbed the Nazi’s of the ability to strip them of everything).
Carrying this forward, he used this knowledge in his role as a psychologist post-war, developing ‘Logotherapy’ (‘meaning’ therapy) to help his patients develop a different attitude to a problem, issue or illness, by presenting a wider context in which the patient could get beyond themselves and deal with, or in most cases cure their malaise.
Meaning and Attitude.
Let me turn this to my own experience. I tend to regard myself as an optimist/realist. Rooted to reality but forever striving to learn more about the universe. My recent experiences have placed this under enormous strain and caused me to put esoteric concerns aside while I switched to ‘survival/fight/cope’ mode. Oddly though, throughout felt I would not fail, at all times used whatever resource around me to cope. Because I felt I had no choice.
My wife Dee was diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer in March 2007. She herself worked as a fundraiser for the UK cancer support organisation MacMillan, and had been inspired to change career years earlier following the death of her mum from the disease.
We took the initial news very hard as any couple would. We’d been together 25 years, and had been very happy. We had faced enormous challenges within our family together and dealt with them as a team. Now our little team was to be no more.
Dee never read Frankl. But she had a strong instinctual understanding that the attitude she chose to her illness and treatment was the key to how she experienced her remaining life. The day after we had received the diagnosis, I stepped out of the hospital room to get us both a drink. When I returned, Dee was sitting looking out of the window, staring into the garden.
After a few minutes of contemplation, she turned to me and said: “Let’s make this the best time. Let’s live like we always dreamed of and never got round to. Let’s blow our cash, go on holidays, party, do stuff with the family.”
Dee knew that even the most advanced treatments could not help her given her medical situation, her cancer was too aggressive. But the attitude she chose gave us the chance to enjoy what turned out to be the best year of our 25 year marriage. And we got to ‘live the dream’ as they say. And not selfishly either. Dee continued fundraising until she was physically unable to, using her plight to draw attention to MacMillan’s fundraising efforts. I was privileged to be her carer, and in our last year together, learnt so much from her and from life.
We didn’t focus on the future, we lived in the moment - the cliche most of us read about in self-help books on the 6.40 from Milton Keynes to Euston, then wistfully put aside as we trudge through life, was suddenly very very real to us.
Dee left this world in February 2008, peacefully. Like many partners left behind would feel, I felt anger at what I felt to be an appalling injustice. But, 9 months on, I feel that her death, like her time on earth, had meaning. This gives me tremendous comfort. There are the obvious elements people ascribe to someone’s life purpose – the children and grandchildren – but the effects of her passing are much deeper.
For one – the overwhelming comment from those attending her funeral was that Dee had inspired them to do something differently in their lives. This varied from person to person. To make a positive change, to do the stuff they’d always talked about, to improve a waning relationship and not take it for granted, to have real conversations and say stuff that needs to be said. To remove blockages. To live more in the now. Many of them have done what they said, painfully sometimes, but ultimately positively.
Since then, the example of my wife’s extraordinary life has caused our family to examine how they live – and to take huge steps to improve. Her death wasn’t in vain – far more than that - like her life, it had meaning and purpose. We just couldn’t see it, and perhaps to our congenitally selfish minds, still feel it was a massive price to pay. We humans are just unable to grasp the bigger scheme of things sometimes, aren’t we?
I have fair reason to believe that she continues her supportive and inspirational role in the spirit world. Maybe that was part of the reason for her leaving us too…
Where am I going with all this? Perhaps to say look for the value, the meaning of each of your past experiences, no matter how painful - or how good! (This is not easy, and I do not mean to trivialise the work involved if the pain of suffering from a recent life experience is just too intense).
I also want to say that I believe fear is irrelevant. Fear nothing. Choose your attitude, like Tomas has tried to show us he is doing in his blog, and you have control, you have power over your life – no-one else. Striving to live this way genuinely allows me to start each day renewed. I hope you can too.
(“There’s always something” – Lemony Snickett’s Series of Unfortunate Events.).
Love, Tim
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