Viktor Frankl: Suffering Is Not Meaningful. How You Bear It Is. (1975)

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[00:00:00]Where does meaning come from?

[00:00:02]I found three paths. The first through what we create, the work we do in the world. The second through what we experience, beauty, truth, nature, and above all through love, through truly encountering another person.

[00:00:20]And the third, the hardest one, through the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

[00:00:27]An old doctor came to me crippled with grief. His wife had died 2 years before and he could not go on. I asked him, what would have happened if you had died first and she had to survive you?

[00:00:42]He looked at me and said, for her it would have been terrible. She would have suffered so much. I said, and that suffering has been spared her because you survived. You are bearing it so she does not have to. He said nothing. He took my hand and left. That session changed his life.

[00:01:03]Not because his pain disappeared, it did not, because his pain had a meaning.

[00:01:10]Suffering in itself is not meaningful. I want to be clear about that. Suffering that can be avoided should be ended, but when it cannot, when fate deals its blow and there is no exit, then the only freedom left is the freedom to choose the shape of your response, to remain dignified, to bear your cross in a way that becomes itself a human achievement.

[00:01:38]A young woman in Auschwitz, dying, she knew it, pointed at a branch she could see through the barracks window, two blossoms on a chestnut tree. She said, I talked to that tree and the tree says, I am here. I am life, eternal life. She died days later, but she died with meaning.

[00:02:01]That is all any of us can ask for.