Life as it is: Find your Way - draft - chapter 2

To see life as it is.

In the play Man of La Mancha by Dale Wasserman, Wasserman recounts the life of Miguel De Cervantes who created and wrote Don Quixote.  There is a moment when Cervantes, who is imprisoned and awaiting trial by the Spanish Inquisition, recounts his earlier life.  He recounts that he has seen it all: pain, suffering, cruelty and hardship.  He was a soldier and one who with his comrades had been captured by the soldiers of Islam.  He describes his comrades as being those who have seen ‘life as it is’ – who have witness first hand the harshness, chaos, brutality, cruelty, pain and suffering of the world as real as it gets.  He says of them when they were dying that they seemed to be asking: Why?

‘I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived.  When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?  Perhaps to be too practical is madness.  To surrender dreams – this may be madness.  To seek treasure where there is only trash.  Too much sanity may be madness.  And maddest of all, to see life as it is, and not as it should be.’

Life can be a living Hell; a place of despair, confusion, anxiety, fear, and turmoil.  It is most certainly this way for those caught in the midst of war - be they soldiers or civilians.  But even so called ‘ordinary’ circumstances and places can seem hellish.  On the streets of your neighborhood, in your classrooms, almost anywhere, it is quite possible, and it happens all too frequently, that someone comes along with a gun and starts shooting – at that moment you have encountered a harbinger of hell.  People die in those moments ‘senselessly’ – before their expected time.

Or consider the daily and ordinary death administered in small doses of alcohol or drugs – taken to dull the pain of daily life without meaning.  How many of us indulge in television, movies, sports, video games, music, dance, chat rooms, the list is endless, for those things we take up, if we are being honest with ourselves, not merely for fun and pleasure but to dull the pain of truly facing the reality of the meaningless monotony of our life.

So many of us are lost but we won’t or can’t admit it.  For to admit it, to see life as it is, would mean to awaken to the truth: I am in Hell.

Viktor Frankl lived through Hell and survived to write about it.  He was one of the many who were taken into the concentration camps, the Hell on Earth, the empire of Hell created by Hitler’s Nazi Germany.  Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning chronicles his life at Auschwitz and other camps.  He has seen life as it is at its worst.  He and the other prisoners of those camps have lived in Hell.

 Living in that Hell was a daily struggle to survive, survive the arbitrary brutality, the starvation, the cold, the utter despair and senselessness.

Frankl wrote: ‘Does not man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?...The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action.  There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability, suppressed.  Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stresses.’

‘Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it became clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.  Fundamentally…any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him – mentally and spiritually.  He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.  Dostoevsky said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

‘We who have lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’

Frankl was a psychiatrist before he entered the camps and when he was liberated from that Hell he returned to that profession.  His writings chronicle his understanding of human suffering and survival, not merely the physical survival but as he notes the more important psychological and spiritual survival of individuals.  Frankl concludes that those who found their way in and out of that Hellish life were those who had within them a reason to live.  Those individuals searched within for meaning and they found it.  The key to their survival was grasping onto a belief that their life even in Hell had meaning and purpose – hence the name of Frankl’s book: Man’s search for meaning.   Finding a way is a search for finding and seeing life not as it is but as it should be.

Our lives may not be the extreme Hellish existence that Frankl faced, though it can be one of pain and suffering.  Or as I said before it can be also simply be one that seems to suck away our vitality through monotony in a job which you can not associate value or purpose.  Such a life bleeds us slowly.  Like the torture of dripping water, drip, drip, drip, it strikes us on the head, each single drop not enough to harm us at all, but the relentless and continues dripping can wear the body, the mind and the spirit down into distraction and despair.

Daily we can read and hear through the news media about poverty here and abroad, about war, murder, robbery, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, sexism, racism, religious intolerance, sectarian violence, the predications of how humanities technology is changing our planets physical environment for the worst – global warming, climate change, oil spills, poisons and toxins in our water and air. 

This is life as it is.  Is it any wonder that so many of us choose to drown ourselves, to turn to so many things, so many sources of distractions, to flee from facing this glimpse of life as it is?

Is it not madness to see our life as it is and not as it should be?

Perhaps your just overwhelmed by the claims of ‘experts’: politicians, scientists, theologians, or neighbors, friends, family or ones own spouse/lover/partner.  They all seem to be saying things that make sense but you don’t know what path to choose, what or how to decide.  Or you try to do what you think is ‘right’ but can’t seem to actually get there and you don’t know why.  You try to listen, understand and explain yourself but they and you don’t seem to hear each other – at least judging by the outcomes.

I generally will not offer much in the way of guidance in to what to specifically think and believe but this book will be a guide offering you new ways to think and to choose.  I will help you to ‘Know Thyself’ and thus to gain insight into knowing others.  Offer you ways to perceive the maps you have been given and thus using so far in life’s journeys.  Knowing that you have been given a map and you have been following its marked out routes of provided by Nature, Nurture and Culture – will make explicit what has probably been implicit and hidden from you conscious awareness – you have been living in a Matrix all along.  This book offers guidance to avoid the traps and pitfalls – how to spot and avoid those bogs, those patches of quagmire, quicksand, thickets of weeds and entanglements.

  I hope to help you way your way in your wanderings.

So do not despair of forever feeling lost and unsure of where you are headed in life no longer.  There are those who have found their way.  They only outwardly seem to wander through the meaninglessness of life that we see around us but they are not lost.  You too may become one of them.  You too can find your way.