I Am Responsible

Just in.  It’s actually cold here in Toronto.  Don’t know what the actual temperature is, but most certainly not the heat we’ve had these past two weeks.  Even with a jacket, it is cold.

I am on a multitude of mailing lists for spiritual and like things, and I just received a reminder e-mail from Philosopher’s Notes, words from a book I read a very, very long time ago, by Victor Frankl called “Man’s Search for Meaning.” My e-mail had this to say in quoting Dr. Frankl (if you don’t know who Frankl is, google him – suffice it to say he spent time in the Nazi concentration camps).

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” – Victor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning

Those are words written by Frankl while in the camps.

These days I am working on just that, “being responsible” instead of “reactionary;” taking ownership for my own life and how I perceive it to be.  If Victor Frankl, in the harshness of a concentration camp, can write those words (and so much more; if you’ve not read the book, I do encourage you to do so), about “being responsible.”  Well, it blows my mind.  Here is a man, in a situation that certainly he didn’t ask for, undergoing all kinds of inhumane treatment…and he is writing (as anyone who writes knows, when we, when I write, it is because I am to hear the words, then perhaps another might, but the lesson is mine to learn) to and of himself that he has to be responsible!  He is seeing and he is saying that he is responsible for his own life; how it is lived, how he perceives it, even in moments of torcher and such harsh conditions I cannot fathom.  Perhaps when seeing those he’d come to know in the camps murdered or tortured so badly they died, it may have been a soothing balm for his soul; to be able to say to himself he is responsible, to be reassured by….whomever out there…there was nothing he could have done?  I don’t know, but I do know from having read his book, his heart, that he suffered much and felt the pain of many, and still, even those who were summoned to torture him and others, you sense a forgiveness within his spirit, like something saying to him that these others, well they were perhaps unconscious, not responsible for they did not know that they could respond in and of themselves, that they did not have to endure and carry out the blind hatred of another man.

Being responsible is a responsibility indeed.  If I take responsibility for my own life, then I cannot blame some circumstance outside of me.  If there is a circumstance I find myself in the middle of, is it that I invited it in or myself allowed to venture therein?  I am responsible, and if I do not like a situation – a person, place or thing in my life, that I and only I, am responsible for doing something about it.  The responsibility is not for the person, place or thing outside of me to alter or change; it is for me….

Now having thus rambled about being responsible and going back to a commentary re Man’s Search for Meaning, my conclusion at this moment is that:  (1)  I am responsible for how my life is; and (2) I will find that, in my search for meaning, within me – not somewhere out there; just as my issues, challenges and even my blessings are not as a result of something external to me, so too the answers I seek are not somewhere out there in some person, place or thing – they are in and a part of who I am.  Knock, and the door will be opened, seek and you will find!

Well, I do hope you got some food for thought…so that you and only you will get answers from you and only you.  When all is said and done, the gem out of reading something that gives you that “Ah ha!” moment, isn’t that the writing was anything great, but that there was a seed of truth within that sparked a light in you; turned on a light so to speak in you mind.

I leave you with a few more quotes from Frankl’s book in case you think I exaggerate the quality of character of this remarkable man who has influenced so many people.

On Choosing One’s Attitude
“Everything can be taken from a man but …the last of the human freedoms – to choose
one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” p.104

“There is also purpose in life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.”  p.106

On Committing to Values and Goals
“Logotherapy…considers man as a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning and in actualizing values, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts.” p.164

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.” p.166

On Discovering the Meaning of Life
“The meaning of our existence is not invented by ourselves, but rather detected.” p.157

“What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.” p.171

“We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by doing a deed; (2) by experiencing a value; and (3) by suffering.” p.176

On Fulfilling One’s Task
“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”
p.127