“Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

William Shakespeare wrote this. More than 300 years later Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm.” So, yes, one could drown in insignificance. Then how does any one of us ever get up in the morning? Sean Norris says that the distance between significance and irrelevance is shorter than you think. “It could be traveled in a single day, a single moment, or even a single word.”

To illustrate how short this distance could be, Viktor Frankl tells the tale of an elderly general practitioner who consulted him because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else.

“Now, how can I help him? What should I tell him? Well, I refrained from telling him anything but instead confronted him with the question, ‘What would have happened, doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!’ Whereupon I replied, ‘You see, doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering – to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her.’ He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left my office. In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning . . .” 

Viktor Frankl wrote ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ about his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. In 1942, at the age of 37 and a mere nine months after marrying Tilly Grosser, Viktor and his family were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp where his father died of starvation and pneumonia. In 1944, Viktor and his surviving relatives were sent to Auschwitz, where his mother and brother died in the gas chambers. Tilly later died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen.

Viktor saw that among his fellow inmates in the camp, those who survived were those who could connect with a purpose in life to feel positive about. The basic principle of what later became Viktor’s logotherapy is that life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones, and that we always have inalienable freedom to find meaning. He also saw a definite link between people’s health and their sense of meaning in life.

“Man is originally characterized by his ‘search for meaning’ rather than his ‘search for himself,’ Viktor says. The more he forgets himself – giving himself to a cause or another person – the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.”

Walker Larson tells the story of how Dan Cnossen did exactly this. Dan is an ex-Navy SEAL who, during a nighttime operation in Afghanistan in 2009, stepped on a pressure plate, igniting a bomb that cost him both his legs.

He had to undergo 40 surgeries and not only recovered from his wounds, but went on to become a Paralympic athlete of the highest order, winning multiple gold medals in skiing. Dan says that we have to break out of a negative perspective to unveil the hundreds of other ways of looking at a situation. He began to look at his experience as a means to motivate others and today he’s a public speaker who uses his life’s trials to inspire people with hope, determination, and resiliency.

“Facing extraordinarily difficult situations is often overwhelming, especially when those situations seem meaningless. Yet meaning is often hidden under the veils of suffering. Learning to see this is one of the most powerful ways to be resilient,” Walker writes. 

Girlfriend, if you can find meaning in adversity, then you will understand how everything happens for you, not to you. You will start looking for your take-away, your gift in every situation and in doing so you transform something ‘unbearably bad’ into something of value.

It is as Victor Hugo wrote: “What makes night within us may leave stars.” – Angie Kleijn.