The meaning of life?

During the early Covid shutdowns, my son and I were at home. Like many workplaces, my dental office was closed to all but emergencies. My son was doing remote learning on his computer.

After the school year wrapped up, I remember my son turning to me, at the age of 7, and saying “I just never thought my life would turn out like this.”

No kidding, I thought. There are about 9 billion other people on earth who are thinking the same thing.

But then I stopped and really considered his statement. Such profound words from a second-grader. His expectations for life weren’t matching with reality. To be fair, his expectations weren’t too grand; he mostly missed hanging out with his friends and playing football at recess. Very reasonable for a typical kid.

Not that long after our conversation, I became ill with a load of bizarre symptoms after a normal case of Covid. Doctor after doctor, still shell-shocked from the Covid meltdown, had no idea what was going on. I eventually did find a person to help me, but it took months of deep concern, multiple blood draws, and more imaging than I care to share.

From time to time during the diagnostic process, I found myself thinking that same thought. “I just never thought my life would turn out like this.”

What I was really saying was: “This was not what was I was expecting out of life”

Though I never really considered myself entitled to anything, the very thought that I should have expectations of what I ought to get from life were…kind of entitled.  Life, as any hard-nosed authority might tell me, did not owe me anything.

Nevertheless, all of the things I was going through felt terribly unfair.

So many things were unfair. Not just things in my own life, but in the world at large. So many people had not made it through the pandemic. There were conflicts raging in multiple regions around the world. I could see signs of inequality and poverty all around me. It is easy to become lost and jaded by viewing things through this lens.

I recently read Yes to Life in Spite of Everything, by Viktor Frankl. Frankl famously wrote another book, Man’s Search for Meaning, about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp. Yes to Life is a compilation of lectures that he gave a mere 9 months after his liberation from the camp.

Frankl, having survived some of the worst atrocities in human history, had some very humbling words for me. He hits on this very notion of “What can I expect from life?” and turns it upside down. He says that we should instead ask: “What does life expect from me?”

When we ask what we expect out of life, we are asking directly for the meaning of life. But when we turn it around, and ask what life expects from us, we recognize that life itself is asking us to define our own meaning. He argues that in responding to the life we are living, or the life that is imposed upon us, we construct this meaning, day by day, and hour by hour.

Frankl says,

 “Living itself means nothing other than being questioned: our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to -of being responsible toward -life.”

He goes on to speak of this in terms of the individual’s responsibility towards life,

 “The tasks that his life imposes are only for him, and only he is required to fulfill them.”

For many of us, things like the pandemic or a personal illness can bring up an initial sense of unfairness, of frustration, and of a certain level of helplessness and loss of control. But, Frankl reframes them. He asks us to step back and look at the things that life is giving us. What questions is it asking us? How will we respond? What meaning do we make in giving our response?

By looking at it differently, we begin to dance with life. Instead of throwing up our hands or becoming embittered, we take a step towards the questions it is asking us. We get to pause and consider what our responsibility is in that moment.

For me, I realized that I should resign sooner than I had planned. I needed to be there for my son. I needed to leave behind the intense stress and pressure that was keeping me ill. Life was asking me to make meaning in that moment.

Before understood this, I was pushing towards my goals and wondering why I felt hollow even after achieving them. The grind, the hustle, the need to achieve perfection, all of those were done without a sense of purpose and left me asking life what the whole thing was about. When the hollow feeling takes over, it is easy to wonder what the point of it is.

But, instead of asking what’s the point of it all, perhaps I should have been wondering why my actions felt pointless? I should have listened as life asked me to demonstrate how I was going to leave my mark, how I was going to make meaning out of what I had been given.

I find this reframing incredibly freeing. I am free to make meaning for myself out of what life brings to me. With that freedom comes responsibility.

The freedom to create great meaning through the very act of living invites each of us to accept massive responsibility. What brings us meaning might not be stylish. It might seem opposite of the prevailing wisdom. And, as in Frankl’s journey, it may at times seem futile.

But saying Yes to Life means being willing to take that on. To show up in spite of the difficulty.

After all, life itself is a sort of hero’s journey. When we finally say yes, when we finally embark on our path, life unfolds, our purpose made clear. The challenges we take on help us forge meaning on our path. In saying “yes” to life, we become the hero of our own story. We accept the good and the bad, we accept our role and our responsibility, and, in the end, we bring our gift of meaning to others, sharing in the richness of that hard earned reward.