“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.”
What triggered me to once again recall Frankl’s words was today’s chat with a lady over the phone. She was definitely a character, mentioning that she was living in a remote area, so there is no doctors or nurses in the town. And she’s got a wooden artificial leg. It wasn’t impressive until she started to make fun of herself, laughed out loudly as if the wooden leg was a toy or a joke, not a pity or anything makes an ordinary person miserable . She was a very noisy woman, high pitched voice and sounded very healthy if the wooden leg not to be counted. I was shocked but her attitude towards her life, meanwhile felt delightful to chat with her. Her optimistic spirit spread in my head and enlightened my day. After hanging up the line, I still can’t help myself immersing in her loud laugh for quite a while. A woman who ever does this, must be spiritually very strong and had looked through the essence of life. Happiness is not something you can imitate. You must practice in your own way, sometimes the way you choose can be painful, but it takes you to a world where is beyond your personal weakness and full of meanings.
Another reason this lady impressed me was some previous thoughts that I have been giving to on some totally opposite examples, like people let themselves fall down with the bad situations or bad lucks in their life. And they lost the interests to use their free wills to choose the good, and just let themselves falling apart, and floating or drifting with their fates. Last time I talked to a lady who almost was weeping in the other end of telephone line and asked me if possible to get someone drop in the house every day just to make sure her alcoholic brother was still alive.
Why people facing the same level of bad situation would choose the different way to respond to it? Someone having a divorced parent, sexually abused in childhood, a bad tempered dad or a alcoholic mom would still choose to use their free will to move on and live a happy life; but others just repeated the same bad behaviors as their moms and dads did (drink, shoplifting, resenting the world, complain why the world is treating them like that) and the only thing they really made was just some excuses that explain why they have had fallen off their grace.
For me, a childhood misfortune or your bad luck maybe matters, but it does not matter more than lacking of free will. Even under the circumstances where people have no capacity to choose their fate, at least they still have the capacity to use their free will to choose their attitude towards their fate. It’s also something I learned from reading Frankl’s books and his Existential Psychology and Logotherapy. Actually from that point on, I understand that this is a world you see no misery but only weak hearts.
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