The world isn’t the way we wished it was; in fact, sometimes it is awful beyond our worst nightmare. Other times it just seems to fall flat.
It’s interesting, and frustrating, that the only solution to life’s problems is found on a pathway of activity, because activity is the very thing you are unable to do when the darkness falls.
It’s a Catch-22, a situation where there seems to be no solution. Dale Carnegie said it this way:
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy."
Which is all great, if the enemy is fear. If fear is the enemy, then the easy antidote is action. Get out there and get waist deep in it and you’ll find plenty of courage, confidence, momentum, and (in time) success.
But what if the enemy is deeper than fear. There is an enemy stronger and more destructive than fear, and no, it’s not shame. It’s a leech seeping into our bedrooms through the cracks in the wall, the gaps between the baseboards.
This enemy isn’t fear or shame, it’s unmeaning—a lack of meaning. It’s the feeling that nothing matters anymore, that nothing in life is meaningful. It seeps in through the cracks and suffocates us where we sleep and Dale Carnegies words fall on dead ears.
The best man I know who fought this beast and won is Victor Frankl, an Austrian Jew who suffered some of the world’s worst evil at Auschwitz. He was a psychiatrist and used his experience to test the heart of man, what makes it tick, what made some survive the camp and others not.
Frankl tells us that the only thing that satisfies us, that keeps us awake and fighting in this world, is meaning. Meaningful relationships, meaningful work, meaningful passions.
For example, if you make success your goal, it won’t satisfy.
Frankl writes, “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so has the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.”
Harold Kushner, revered Jewish Rabbi in Massachussets, wrote the forward to Frankl’s book, and he summarized it all by writing this: “Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life.”
So when the doldrums hit you, or your team, or someone you love, let’s not be mistaken, the enemy isn’t the situation or the problem or the person; it’s a lack of meaning.
It takes courage to give your life for a cause, but no one ever voluntarily died for something they didn’t think was worth it.
You can’t have courage without meaning.
You can’t have happiness without meaning.
"What man actually needs is not some tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him." ~Victor Frankl