“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Victor Frankl
Viktor Frankl survived a nazi concentration camp, though his mother father and wife did not. He determined as a neurologist, psychiatrist and philosopher that attitude is the last of the human freedoms and it cannot be taken from a man when everything else can be and for him as an Austrian Jewish man everything was taken. how can We not admire this man, who took particular interest in studying depression and suicide, set up counseling centers and headed a female suicide prevention program seeking to decrease teen suicide. After seeing his family murdered and suffered in a concentration camp he somehow rose from the ashes returned to Vienna and became head of the neurological department publishing the well known book, “man’s search for meaning.” Our lives are weighed down every day with things we cannot change or control and I think the temptation is to crumble beneath this reality. Unless we change our approach. Viktor is proof that humanity has the inborn ability to be resilient. His life is evidence of an inner dimension of strength that permeates our DNA and transcends the darkness in the world. He says this, “what is to give light must endure burning.” Not only is Viktor himself evidence of resiliency in mankind, but of reality that suffering produces something far beyond anything we can produce synthetically, suffering is the organic way life emerges. And even in suffering we have a choice in how we will respond; even in our darkest hour there is a shred of freedom and hope and light.
The Art Place 