How Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning challenged me to grow into happiness and let go of my crippling questions.
As a college student, I had daily plagues of what Frankl describes as a “question that burns under [their] fingernails” (Frankl, xiii). I found myself as an English major in classes on Poetry, Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Genocide which asked me questions to which I did not know the answer. Even when I held onto everything I wanted in life, I would stay up at night wondering, treading in my mind for the answers major flaws in humanity — major flaws in myself. Why am I not happy? Why am I afraid to lose what I have? I had everything I wanted and was not happy.
Years later, and I am the happiest woman in the room. In public and alone, I have a sense of belonging and righteousness in my life, my love, and the life I have with him.
What changed? I read until I found my heart’s canon, beginning with Viktor Frankl.
Frankl wrote A Man’s Search for Meaning in nine days. This book captured me in its simplicity and its pertinence. Frankl writes plenty of quips that can easily be taken out of context from his suffering before, during, and after his time in the concentration camp. These notable quotations offer insight on how to be happy and relinquish the need to control everything. Some of the lines I circled or highlighted in this book are universal themes I have read elsewhere in treasured works by John Steinbeck and Mary Oliver. For example, Frankl writes:
“Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.” (Frankl, xv)
The simplicity of his philosophy seems oversimple for someone with anxiety or depression, but when you consider his life it seems as though it worked for him. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist. He studied depression and suicide before he was taken to three different concentration camps. His wife and immediate family died in concentration camps, and yet he tells us happiness will happen if you do not aim for it. The ideal captured in this quotation echoes one of my favorite pieces of writing, John Steinbeck’s letter to his son about finding love. He passes on his wisdom simply.
“And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.”
While many pessimists and realists will disagree with Steinbeck, his words are a comforting pat on the back to let happiness happen, to not seek or protect the love but to let it live and hold it as a good thing. Frankl agrees as well.
While Frankl and Steinbeck both echo each other, Mary Oliver brings in a more modern and anxiety-driven outlook on the idea. Mary Oliver in “Upstream” writes about the duty of creatives. Oliver dwells on how the lover in all of us is Poe-like, as in Edgar Allen Poe. She writes:
“We do not think of it every day but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestation of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.” (Oliver, pg. 91)
Oliver acknowledges our “gift” of questioning paired with our gift of loving — how both can be a curse when combined without equilibrium. Her observance that when we are happy, we know it will not last and we question its nature is honest. But to be able to accept the happiness of being in love or finding a state of contentment without overwhelming questioning (a two-part love to one-part questioning potion) allows us to appreciate the love we hold, the happiness we have found. To realize that “nothing good gets away” allows us to trust that what we have will last, as long as it is good. Steinbeck’s good does not mean “good enough” it means the purest, most essential version of what good means. Good for Steinbeck is the word that God supposedly coined after creating the universe — I see it and it is “good.”
While my search used to include picking my professor’s brains and maybe even crying into my journal, my search ended when I had completed this canon of reading. Frankl, Steinbeck, and Oliver led me away from searching and into a phase of appreciating. You do not have to hold everything in your control and know exactly what it is and what it means. Instead, these three lovers and geniuses allowed me to hold something long enough to realize it is good (Steinbeck good) and that questioning it, picking it apart, and holding it out for inspection halts the process of “happening.”
Frankl, Steinbeck, and Oliver are all logical writers and logical thinkers. While they write beautifully of love, emotion, and human existence, their writing takes what they have seen, what they have studied, and makes sense of it logically. One part of me that is curious and realist makes me doubt this vulnerable state of being as taking the easy way out — but it is not so. These three friends of mine (Frankl, Steinbeck, and Oliver) all have their fears and their questions, or they would not write, they would not want to share their golden nuggets of ideas about being human and loving. It takes a great deal of effort and strength to let go and trust what you have in your life, but by doing so I have been able to enjoy it wholeheartedly. I still have bouts of anxiety and I still have doubts, but I have accepted my vulnerable and volatile state of happiness thanks to the trilogy in my heart’s canon.
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