Finding a Why to Live

 

          Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’ Nietzsche

 

            Nietzsche gets down to the brass tacks for grievers. When someone central to our life dies, and it feels like there is nothing left, we need to find a why to want to continue on. We can continue to breathe, eat, and sleep for a long time, lumbering like a zombie through our days, but to feel zest and energy for life again, we need to find something that makes us eager to get out of bed in the morning.

 

            Creating new dreams without our loved one in it is daunting.

 

Finding meaning is a central quest in life, anyway. If you’re like me, every now and then you ask yourself questions like this: “Why am I here? Does my life have a purpose? Is there something that I’m supposed to do?” Without a sense of purpose or meaning after a loved one dies, it can be hard to care about anything. It’s a question that keeps a lot of us up at night, and it’s an existential one, meaning that we may never find an answer that completely satisfies us. We want to find the eternal reality that lives behind the reality that we can see and touch. The partial answers we find guide our everyday lives.

 

Movies often deal with this theme, like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life that takes different ways that people find meaning and pushes each of them into silliness. Others present opposing world views, like the discussion between two people about whether meaning is found better in the experiences of human living or in spirituality that denies the validity of emotions and physical passions, as in My Dinner with Andre. Most of us are not called to lead an ascetic life, so we have to find our meaning in the messy chaos of life.

 

There is no one answer to what this meaning is because people find meaning in different ways. Sharing a cold beer with the rest of the farm crew at the end of a work day is meaningful because it’s about the joy of working together, and accomplishing a task. The beer is an extra benefit.

 

Some religions direct their followers to live as one dead and focus only on reaching the Afterlife, with life in this world being something we have to endure as if living a human life is irrelevant. Some preachers focus on making yourself perfect, while other groups focus on taking care of those who are suffering, believing that we are God’s hands in this world. Buddhism finds meaning in this moment, and being fully present to it.

 

Seventy-five years ago, Viktor Frankl wrote about the horrors of living in a Nazi concentration camp. After watching many of his friends and family being starved, tortured, and murdered, he tried to make sense of it in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. He noticed that those who took care of others in the camp did better than those who had lost faith in the future. 

 

This is similar to Chiura Obata telling his fellow Japanese American inmates at the Topaz, Utah internment camp that they could either stare at the barbed wire fence around them or look at the beauty of the mountains beyond. Frankl wrote, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” He also wrote, “The meaning of life is to give life meaning.” and 

 

“If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”

 

Recently, David Kessler wrote about drifting after the death of a loved one in his book Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. He cowrote the book on the five stages of grief with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. He says that while we can’t control what happens to us, we can control how we respond. “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.” (Do we work with grief and learn what it has to teach, or do we fight against it?) What he is saying is that when we finally accept the death of a loved one (this is the fifth stage, and there are different layers of acceptance), then we begin to reorient ourselves to life without our loved one actively in it, and we begin to find new meaning. Each of us has to discover how this is going to be true for us.

 

While we may not find any meaning in our loved one’s death, we can find meaning

in believing they are no longer in pain and safely in Heaven. We can find meaning in our grieving because it often uncovers strengths within us that we didn’t realize we had, meaning in finally understanding what grief, dying, and death are about, and meaning in using this awareness to help others with their grief, in ways that we wouldn’t have been able to do before. 

 

We can find meaning in our memories of life with our loved one, and meaning in being present during their last hours. (Was it meaningful to them the we were with them? I bet it was.) If they died of something like pancreatic cancer, we can find meaning in working with groups that help families who are dealing with this type of cancer.

 

            There is meaning in being present to this day, to just BE HERE, in this moment, and interacting with the people who are here. Each moment of life is sprinkled with wonders. We would notice more of them if we stopped rushing to get somewhere else, but too often we walk by these epiphanies that are happening on the side.

 

            There is meaning in this moment because we are alive. There is meaning in helping others with chores. There is meaning in what we do for a living, and meaning in what people mean to us, and what we mean to them. There’s meaning in walking in the woods and being part of nature for an hour or an afternoon, because sometimes we need time away from being focused on a purpose, and let life happen.

 

Some people think that being who we are is our purpose, because too often we try to be who others want us to be, and we tuck our thoughts and feelings away and become an artificial person. Yet our friends want to know us, a human being who is noble in some things, and flawed in others. They want us to be authentic.

 

Do what matters to you. The rest will fall into place.