On crises in a life
Sometimes life caves in.
Sometimes so much piles up at once that a thought arises which is hard to say out loud:
that something is fundamentally wrong. Not only the situation. Perhaps me.
That thought is understandable. And it makes what is already hard harder still.
Viktor Frankl survived four concentration camps.
Auschwitz. Kaufering. Türkheim. Dachau.
He lost his wife, his mother, his brother. Almost everything he had.
What he did not lose he later described like this:
The last human freedom is the freedom to choose your attitude towards what happens to you.
That is not consolation. It is an observation. And one of the hardest there is.
Frankl never claimed this was easy. He never claimed that pain disappears once you give it a meaning.
He described what remains possible even when almost everything falls away.
There is a well-known image from psychotherapy:
a twenty-euro note is held up. Crumpled. Thrown on the floor. Trodden on. Unfolded again.
Its value? Still twenty euros.
A crisis does not change a person's worth. It leaves traces. It exhausts. It shakes.
Sometimes for a very long time.
But it says nothing about who someone is.
Deep crises are no sign that something is fundamentally going wrong.
They are part of a life that is really being lived.
Frankl did not think it away.
He endured it.
And in doing so found something that could not be taken from him.
Not happiness. Not resolution.
But an inner movement.
The freedom to take a stance towards what happens to you.
Even when you did not choose it.
Even when it takes a long time.
And the outcome stays open.
If you want to read more: Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning