When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade
When life throws bad things at you that are beyond your control, how do you reach some kind of acceptance? This is a question I am still pondering regarding my recently diagnosed chronic illness. I found some excellent insight in the book Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl. All quotations are from the Beacon Press 2006 edition.
Victor Frankl was a respected Viennese psychiatrist who survived the horrors of four concentration camps during the Holocaust, and emerged with the idea that people can find meaning in their lives in the worst of conditions. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner describes Frankl’s most enduring insight in the Foreword, p.X:
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
How to Find Meaning in Suffering
In his book, Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar says that the way to become happier is to find both joy and meaning in your life–to enjoy the journey while aiming for a destination. There are plenty of small things we can to do look for joy in the moment.
But what if life puts insurmountable obstacles between you and your goals, taking away your destination or your power to reach it? Can you still find meaning in your life?
You Always Have a Choice
Victor Frankl says you can find meaning anywhere. He tells the story of a young quadriplegic who, three years after his accident at age 17, has learned to function well enough to attend college. The young man wrote to Frankl in a letter:
I view my life as being abundant with meaning and purpose. The attitude that I adopted on that fateful day has become my personal credo for life: I broke my neck, it didn’t break me. –p. 147.
Frankl tells a story of another encounter to illustrate how a change of interpretation can make all the difference:
Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he loved above all else. Now, how could 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 has 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, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. –p. 112-113.
The man could have given up in despair. After all, no one could bring his wife back. Instead, his love for her began to sustain him through his grief.
I am still pondering how to interpret my own chronic illness, but now I believe there is meaning to be made of it, and I will find it if I just keep looking.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
