Healing comes from gathering wisdom from past actions and letting go of the pain that the education cost you.
—CAROLYN MYSS
How shall we live through crises—individual challenges like illness, job loss, the death of a loved one, societal upheavals such as a pandemic, climate change, or widespread civil strife? Can we find positive change through crisis—a renewed appreciation of life, a newfound sense of personal strength, and a fresh focus on purpose?
In his novel A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.” A more well-known version of this insight is Friedrich Nietzsche’s axiom “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” These passages speak to the possibility of growth from adversity. Crises reveal to us the unvarnished truth and expose to light where and how our sense of security and certainty are false. But can such stark revelations have a positive aspect?
Yes! People can persevere and carry on with renewed energy even following life’s most critical challenges. We can grow and build new strength from our crisis experiences, just so long as we remain focused on purpose. Whether our struggles are major traumas or the inevitable suffering that all of us will experience over the course of our lifetimes, each of us has the ability to recognize positive effects that can follow from adversity.
We refer again to the life and lessons of Viktor Frankl. By highlighting Frankl’s story, we are in no way implying that traumatic events are good—of course, they are not. Rather, we are emphasizing the message of Frankl’s clear sense of purpose. He wrote: “The last of the human freedom’s is choice—to choose your way in spite of the circumstances.” In his posthumously released book Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, Frankl offers an insightful exploration of his basic conviction that every crisis contains opportunity. Eleven months after he was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp, Frankl held a series of public lectures explaining his central thoughts on meaning, resilience, and the importance of embracing life even amid great adversity.
Frankl’s insights resonate as strongly today, as the world faces such existential crises as climate change, social isolation, wars, and economic uncertainty. While in the concentration camp, Frankl realized he had one single freedom left. He had the power to choose his response to the horror around him. And so he chose to make a difference. He chose to rise every day and give others a kind word, a crust of bread, hope. He imagined his pregnant wife, Tilly, and the prospect of being with her again. He imagined finishing the book that he had been writing up to the very day he was imprisoned. He wrote it over and over in his mind and on tiny scraps of paper that he hid. He imagined himself teaching students after the war about the lessons he had learned. He learned from the strength of his fellow inmates that it is always possible to say yes to life.
Tragically, while Frankl survived, his family did not. Leaving the camp weighing eighty-seven pounds, he returned to Vienna to heal. When he recovered, he chronicled his experiences and the insights he had drawn from them. In nine days he wrote the classic Man’s Search for Meaning, which has sold millions of copies worldwide and helped millions of people struggling to find meaning in life.
A human being is a deciding being. Frankl wrote: “To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.” That freedom arises from the power of choice. Our choices define us, with the potential to be lifesaving or life changing. Frankl believed people should not search for an abstract meaning of life. In his view we all have our own vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment, which demands fulfillment.
That concrete assignment is a choice, as he put it, to “say ‘Yes’ to Life.” It’s a call to the deepest part of us to rise on purpose. As our purpose evolves over our lifetime, it gives our lives meaning. We are not burdened by purpose as a sense of duty or moral obligation. We choose to make a difference because we recognize that there is space between the initial stimulus and our response to it. That’s the space filled with purpose.
Contemporary scientific research continues to validate what Frankl and many spiritual traditions teach—that purpose is not a luxury for good times. It is core to all times and has been from the dawn of humanity. Studies show the role purpose plays in improvement of ailments ranging from pain and depression to Alzheimer’s and other diseases. Although this so-called purpose effect remains largely shrouded in scientific mystery, researchers attribute some aspects to active mechanisms in the brain that influence the immune response and the will to live.
Science shows having a reason to live that is meaningful to us and beyond ourselves—whatever level of adversity we face— is universal and fundamental to surviving and thriving. When it comes to life’s inevitable breakdowns, purpose can provide breakthroughs. Purpose gives us the will to live, a reason to rise in the morning. Our “Big P” purpose, once defined, cannot be taken from us by others or by external events. It remains a constant amid life’s constant changes.
To unlock our life purpose, we must think of purpose as a verb—action leads to clarity. What do we do to live purposefully? How do we apply our gifts in service to others? How can we awaken, inspire, ignite, support? Can we persuade, challenge, teach, coach, direct? Are we naturally moved to create, design, organize, compose, master? Can we help, befriend, listen, love, accept, share? Do we seek, heal, liberate, enable, achieve?
Your life purpose actions reveal what is unique and powerful about you, the gifts you express naturally and enjoy giving. Right now, you have a gift to give in the area of your life purpose. There is something that you do that comes from inside that you actively want to offer others. This gift of life purpose is given to you to give away to others. Purpose requires action. Consider and answer the following three questions. Don’t overthink this—your first response will be your best:
For Dave, for instance, each of these points to what happens in the classroom. He likes nothing more than sharing with his colleagues lessons and activities he’s created to inspire philosophical inquiry. And when he’s leading those exercises and activities with young people, time just flies by. No surprise that when he thinks about his purpose and how he uses his gifts in support of that, teaching and learning emerge clearly. Over the years colleagues and students have been kind enough, on occasion, to thank Dave for sharing his gifts as a teacher. But the real gift, he knows, is having the opportunity to share one’s gifts. He is deeply grateful for being able to do what he truly enjoys— exploring ideas in dialogue and discussion with others—as it allows him to recognize and reveal his evolving “Big P” purpose in life.
Reflecting on your own gifts and how you naturally share them can be similarly revealing of your own true purpose. The same goes for two other key elements of purpose—your passions and your values. Acknowledging your gifts, your passions, and your values is key to unlocking your overall sense of purpose.
Purpose feeds three deep spiritual hungers: (1) to connect deeply with the power of choice in our lives; (2) to actively know that we have a unique gift to offer the world; and (3) to use our gifts to make a contribution in some meaningful way. Our voice in the world comes from the gifts within us, but we must unlock them and choose the calling through which we express them. When we work and live with purpose, we bring together the needs of the world with our special gifts in a vocation or calling.
Passion is what keeps us up at night; it’s what we deeply care about; it’s what moves us. It is the conscious choice of what, where, and how to make a positive contribution to our world. As the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, many people die with their music still inside them. Our “music” is a metaphor for the quality or passion around which we choose to express our gifts. Once we discover our music—what moves us—life takes on a new energy. Our music is so powerful that we can hardly refrain from moving to its rhythm. It compels us to move, to take action.
Our world is incomplete until each one of us discovers our own music, what personally moves us. No other person can hear our music calling. We must listen and act on it for ourselves. To hear it, we need an environment that supports exploring our passion. To hear our own music, we need to listen to our deepest yearnings. The purpose path requires the practice of reflection, and that begins with listening deeply to what we’re passionate about.
Each of us is born with a moral sense of purpose. We live in a value-centered universe. Every organism in the universe has a design—a set of gifts that determines its function and role. A critical part of our growth is the search for those gifts and discovering how to apply them in alignment with our values. The true joy in life is to turn ourselves inside out to realize that our purpose already exists within. This is how we unlock and express our values. Each life has a natural, built-in reason to rise. That reason is to make a positive contribution to the world around it. Purpose is the creative spirit of life moving through us, from the inside out. It is the deep, mysterious direction in each of us where we have a profound intuitive sense of who we are, where we came from, where we are going, and how we might get there.
The Universe is a vast jigsaw puzzle. Each person is a unique piece of that puzzle. Take away any one of us, and the puzzle is incomplete—something essential is missing. Perhaps the shape of our individual puzzle piece is determined by the Universe itself; our purpose is our unique fit. Or perhaps we get to decide what shape our puzzle piece will become. It doesn’t really matter because in either case, we all have unique gifts built into our core, which we experience through the expression of our values. Each of us is an experiment of one. Otherwise, we would not in our deepest moments ask: Why? Our purpose path is shaped by the choices we make, or fail to make, during our lives.