Years ago, yet I visualize it in the moment, a student in my high school junior honors English class came up to me after students had departed.
“I don’t want to go on living. I get up early each morning and come to school and sit though days of meaningless classes. Then I go home and do three or four more hours of meaningless homework.”
Deeply moved, yet at a complete loss of what to say or do, I told her I agreed with her; our schools are operating on an ancient system.
That was pre digital. Today, requiring students to endure day after day of sitting in classes, listening to teachers talk about things with little meaning or application to their lives might be considered cruel and unusual punishment. I believe it contributes to the rise in ADD and ADHD.
Strange I became a teacher. In elementary school I watched the clock and wished I could move the hands ahead to the bell. In middle and high school I struggled to survive. Even if I had the courage to approach someone for help as this girl did, I could not have found the words. All I knew was sitting through each day of school was torture.
As a teacher, best I could, I connected literature and writing to my students lives. At times, the discussions went afield, because some of the assigned readings had little meaning in their lives. The discussions infused the reading and writing assignments with meaning.
Meaning In Suffering
I was an adherent of Victor Frankl’s Logotherapy without knowing it. Victor Frankl is best known for his poignant account of his three years in Auschwitz and Dachau death camps. Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” should have been one the readings assigned to my students. Frankl describes how he found meaning in his life while in Nazi concentration camps with death all around him.
From Greek “logos” translated meaning, Logotherapy is about finding meaning in your life, even in your suffering. Literally, Logotherapy is therapy through meaning.
Frankl said “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering. Those who have a “why” to live can bear almost any “how.”
Frankl does not mean that you should not avoid suffering. You should do all you can to avoid suffering, but if it is unavoidable, you should seek meaning in the suffering and use suffering to infuse your life with meaning. That meaning differs from person to person, from day to day, even from hour to hour.
It is possible to find meaning in a hopeless situation as a victim when facing a fate that cannot be changed. We are then challenged to change ourselves. We are challenged to transform tragedy into a personal triumph. We can do this at any stage in life.
In his three years in the death camps, Frankl learned that those who survived had something they could look forward to, be it a task or a person waiting for them in the future. They looked toward a meaning to be fulfilled by them in the future. Perhaps this is the message I might have tried to communicate to my student.
Suffering can have meaning if it changes you for the better. I would not find life such a blessing now if I hadn’t have suffered and developed into who I am now. But even for one who is suffering in the moment, meaning in life can be the ability to endure and rise above the suffering by finding meaning in the suffering.
Self-transcendence
Hitomi Dames State of the Sound 2017 Cover Photo
You find meaning and become your true self by forgetting yourself to an extent and focusing outwardly and giving of yourself. A goal of Logotherapy is to move from a focus inside to a more balanced and external focus. In this sense, self-transcendence is similar to Metacognitive Therapy, Attention Training Therapy, and Open Focus.
You might find self-transcendence in caring for others within or outside of a vocation. You can find self-transcendence by discovering and expriencing goodness, truth, and beauty. It might be found experiencing nature and culture, or experiencing and loving another person. By loving, you see the essence and potential in another person that is not yet actualized and ought to be actualized.
Frankl says that love is the only way you can comprehend another human being in the innermost core of her/his personality. Then you can see the potential that is not yet self-actualized, but should be. By making her/him aware of what he/she could become, he/she may someday actualize this potential.
As difficult as teaching was for me, it offered a means of self-transcendence. When you are with groups of kids five days a week, they become as close as family. I got to see the essence and potential of more than a few of my students. I hope I helped them to look toward their potential.
There is meaning in life beyond work and love. When all is hopeless and we are just another victim, we can find meaning in turning this tragedy into personal triumph, not by changing the situation, but by changing ourself. We all must discover a meaning that it is unique for each of us. Meaning in life is available to everyone, under all conditions, up to one’s last breath.
Helping Students Find Meaning
If I had the chance to answer the girl’s question, it would be indirectly by assigning “The Will to Meaning” to the entire class. We would read it aloud in class and discuss it in bits and pieces. The discussion would hopefully lead to a search for finding meaning in life, their own personal meaning. In this way they might get a glimpse of who they might become.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
