TOW: Hardship

Before I got some news half-way through the week that my grandmother had passed away in her sleep things were looking a little bit brighter. Funerals of someone you love are always hard, and the stress it adds to an already stressful day or week makes life seem a little duller. And that's why this thought of the week is dedicated to hardship, unfortunately.

It's not unfortunate that she had die, or that she had to pass away the way she did, since she was a strong lady, and she lived a full life, and I did have a chance to form a relationship with her. The unfortunate part is that those still living often deal with hardship...the feeling that the weight of the world is heavy. And it's not heavy because it's too much or that we don't want to carry it. It's heavy simply because the facts of life simply are not what we expect them to be. And because of that, our world, which isn't perfect, often makes us face challenges we don't want to face, and deal with problems we don't want to be real.

Philosophy has always had a lot to say about the problems of humanity. (Heck, one of my specialities in philosophy is moral suffering. Eh heh. Drama.) One of the best accounts, of course, is by Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust and Auschwitz. He had some very brilliant things to say about the problems of human suffering. Frankl himself experienced deep suffering, given that he was separated from his wife and parents (who were killed in the camps), and the only direct member of his family that survived was his sister.

Frankl, through his experience in Nazi Germany, devised something called logotherapy. When the physical life is too much, there is a retreat into mental life that can keep us alive, even when suffering removes all reasonable hope. For every situation that creates hardship, we can let it dehumanize us, turn us into objects or collateral damage, or we can be as we are, human and free. And as we create and imagine, and grow as creatures that think and have spiritual capacities, we search for meaning and purpose, so that hardship is not the only answer at the beginning or the end of our lives.

There are answers beyond just pleasure and pain. And those answers are ours to create.