Lightning Strikes and Courage and the Meaning of Life
Lightning struck MY little one yesterday, and after all we’ve been through and the many discussions we’ve had on the matter, I wanted to share some with the “community” and voice some thoughts and feelings and perhaps a bit more.
First I want to tell you that I’m so proud of MY little one… her strength and her heart and her courage... she’s a wonder I tell you, though too often she won’t see it, but as I tell her… “I speak only truth”
So sometimes lightning hits and you (and/or those around you) survive… changed… but you survive… sometimes lightning kills. I’m a survivor of at least two strong hits. My father was killed in an industrial accident when I was fiver years old, and when I was in college, the uncle who “filled in” for him as I grew up was killed in the very same way. All the feelings of unfairness and not being able to make sense or rationalize the “why” have sent me on a long hard sojourn for peace and understanding. I won’t say that “grail” is attainable, or even within reach ever, but here’s what I know now…
Many folks get through life without the lightning strike… fortunate they are, but many suffer so much more than we. The earth is littered with anonymous corpses of eons past, and it doesn’t matter particularly, I think, if you believe in God or a higher power or even if you’re a spiritual person. Some things we can influence and control. Some things we can’t, and when I pray, I do so not only for the ones I love, but for all the souls who hurt.
A psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl wrote a book called “Man’s Search For Meaning” that was published in 1959. Frankl, a Jew, had been a prisoner of war at Auschwitz and Dachau during World War II, and from some of the most dehumanizing conditions on human record, we have a work that’s rational and uplifting. Frankl was fond of quoting Nietzche who said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” But more than anything, two short passages are wisdom. The first where he was being marched to his daily work assignment, starving and freezing and beaten along the road, struck me as wisdom. Frankl wrote:
“And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we knew each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous that the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and human belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
And again, “In the concentration camp, every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals are snatched away. What alone remains is the last of human freedoms -- the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
Now as we face this latest lightning strike together, I counsel MY little one there’s no way to prepare for such a thing. When we knew sad was coming did it hurt any less when it finally arrived ? And if we’d known where or when the lighting was going to hit, would we have avoided that place and time or rushed headlong into our destiny ?
It doesn’t matter. We take the opportunity to put our feet on the floor each morning for granted all too much. We stew and fret and regret yesterday when it’s unchangeably gone, and the only lesson to be learned is we can change tomorrow. Life is fragile, but enduring nonetheless. And “I know I’ll often stop and think about them,” as Lennon so eloquently puts it, tells us right where to go every day… “In my life, I love you more” is NOT in the past tense… it’s looking to the unknown, where another lightening strike may be lurking, but “meaning” is in (and only in I say) love… It’s called “life”… live it, won't you please.
First I want to tell you that I’m so proud of MY little one… her strength and her heart and her courage... she’s a wonder I tell you, though too often she won’t see it, but as I tell her… “I speak only truth”
So sometimes lightning hits and you (and/or those around you) survive… changed… but you survive… sometimes lightning kills. I’m a survivor of at least two strong hits. My father was killed in an industrial accident when I was fiver years old, and when I was in college, the uncle who “filled in” for him as I grew up was killed in the very same way. All the feelings of unfairness and not being able to make sense or rationalize the “why” have sent me on a long hard sojourn for peace and understanding. I won’t say that “grail” is attainable, or even within reach ever, but here’s what I know now…
Many folks get through life without the lightning strike… fortunate they are, but many suffer so much more than we. The earth is littered with anonymous corpses of eons past, and it doesn’t matter particularly, I think, if you believe in God or a higher power or even if you’re a spiritual person. Some things we can influence and control. Some things we can’t, and when I pray, I do so not only for the ones I love, but for all the souls who hurt.
A psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl wrote a book called “Man’s Search For Meaning” that was published in 1959. Frankl, a Jew, had been a prisoner of war at Auschwitz and Dachau during World War II, and from some of the most dehumanizing conditions on human record, we have a work that’s rational and uplifting. Frankl was fond of quoting Nietzche who said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” But more than anything, two short passages are wisdom. The first where he was being marched to his daily work assignment, starving and freezing and beaten along the road, struck me as wisdom. Frankl wrote:
“And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we knew each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous that the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and human belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
And again, “In the concentration camp, every circumstance conspires to make the prisoner lose his hold. All the familiar goals are snatched away. What alone remains is the last of human freedoms -- the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
Now as we face this latest lightning strike together, I counsel MY little one there’s no way to prepare for such a thing. When we knew sad was coming did it hurt any less when it finally arrived ? And if we’d known where or when the lighting was going to hit, would we have avoided that place and time or rushed headlong into our destiny ?
It doesn’t matter. We take the opportunity to put our feet on the floor each morning for granted all too much. We stew and fret and regret yesterday when it’s unchangeably gone, and the only lesson to be learned is we can change tomorrow. Life is fragile, but enduring nonetheless. And “I know I’ll often stop and think about them,” as Lennon so eloquently puts it, tells us right where to go every day… “In my life, I love you more” is NOT in the past tense… it’s looking to the unknown, where another lightening strike may be lurking, but “meaning” is in (and only in I say) love… It’s called “life”… live it, won't you please.
posted by little one | 10/13/2005 06:26:00 PM
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