Meaning and the inner world
The Silent Camps Within Us
The cough that had lasted for days would not go away; I still had not recovered. After a week, I asked to leave work early. The medicine was making me sleepy. Perhaps the best thing to do…
The cough that had lasted for days would not go away; I still had not recovered. After a week, I asked to leave work early. The medicine was making me sleepy. Perhaps the best thing was to go home and sleep. But I thought a little walk in the fresh air might do me good.
As I approached home, I stopped at the Botanical Park along the way. Getting away from the city's confusion and catching my breath somewhere quiet would be welcome.
The weather was lovely. The park was as peaceful as ever. I walked for a while, then sat down at the café in the park. I ordered a herbal tea.
There was a small bookcase inside the café. As I glanced at the spines, I noticed Man's Search for Meaning on one of them. I took it from the shelf.
I chose a sunny table with a comfortable chair and put the book in front of me. I thought I would read a little and then rest. I began turning the pages.
Before long, I found myself absorbed in the book.
With the herbal tea helping me relax, my eyes had grown heavy. I had slept for a while. When I woke, the book was the first thing I looked at again. It had caught my interest. Perhaps I had found exactly the book I needed that day.
I borrowed it.
Borrowed books come with a little urgency of their own. They have to go back.
As I read Frankl's accounts of the death camps, I was struck by a person's ability to hold on to the search for meaning. To find a reason to cling to life even in such terrible conditions…
Then I thought about our own lives.
Perhaps there is no barbed wire in our lives. But sometimes we draw invisible boundaries within ourselves.
Other people's expectations.
What we cannot say.
What we cannot let go of.
Our fears.
Sometimes we stay for a long time inside a thought, a hurt left over from the past or a sentence that says, ‘I cannot do it.’
Perhaps these are the quietest camps we build within ourselves.
No one locks us in there.
Often, the key is in our own hands.
Yet leaving still is not easy.
Reading Frankl, I looked at my own life once more.
Perhaps meaning is not about life handing us a ready-made answer, but about finding our own answer within what we experience.
Sometimes we find it on a page of a book, sometimes on a walk through a park, sometimes in an ordinary day we would otherwise pass through without noticing.
That day, I paused in the park and thought about this.
Perhaps the steps we take towards ourselves do not need to be large. Sometimes it is enough to stop, walk a little and try to hear the voice inside.
Because when we hear the sound of our own life again, we slowly begin to remember where we want to go.
Perhaps the meaning we seek is not a ready-made answer waiting at the end of the road.
Perhaps it emerges as we walk, live and draw a little closer to ourselves.
That day, I had gone to the park simply to get some air.
I came back with a book.
And on the way home, I was thinking about questions I had not asked myself for a long time.