Questioned by Life

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Love, Frankl and Midlife

I continue reading through Viktor Frankl’s fascinating The Doctor and the Soul, and I find it both enlightening and frustrating. Enlightening because I can see things from a different angle, frustrating because just when I think I’m going to get to a real insight about myself, he moves on the next point. I find I wish I could talk to him face-to-face.

Last night I finished the chapter on love, and while most of it was on point, I have a few quibbles.

Frankl distinguishes between sexual desire (i.e., lust), erotic desire (i.e., infatuation) and love. Lust is purely physical, of course. Erotic desire involves the psychological as well as the physical. In other words, erotic desire is the desire to have/be with a person for their personality as well as their looks. Love, on the other hand, is the full, non-possessive appreciation of a whole person. Love can be experienced in a monogamous relationship, or it can be for a relative, etc. Up to this point I agree fully.

What I think Frankl didn’t spell out and should have is that for monogamous, coupling relationships, lust and infatuation are stages one must go through to reach love. I don’t think many, if any, leap ahead directly to love, bypassing lust and erotic desire, to establish monogamous relationships. Love minus sexual and erotic attraction is simply a deep friendship (which is a wonderful thing, by the way), but not the basis for a monogamous coupling.

To be sure, I agree with Frankl that if a relationship gets stuck at the possessive, erotic desire stage, it isn’t love. Furthermore, a relationship stuck at that stage is fragile. If the partners cannot move it to real love, it may not be able to hold up over time and the vicissitudes of life.

Frankl also reiterates that one does not have to experience love to make life meaningful. One can also make life meaningful through action and through one’s attitude toward unavoidable suffering. In fact there comes a point in some people’s lives when love is admittedly no longer possible, and they must make meaning otherwise. He maintains however that if one does not experience love and feels resentment toward life over this, he will hamper the meaning-making in his life. To be able to live without love and yet not be resentful about that is a path toward meaning-making.

And this is what I must learn to do. I freely admit I harbor resentment for not having been able to find/have/create love in my life. All my past relationships never got beyond the infatuation stage. I may have thought I was in love, but I wasn’t. Between coming out late and having warped ideals of love modeled for me while growing up, I was hampered in the pursuit of love. If I could undo my past I would certainly change how I did things.

But now I’m at a stage of life in which I believe opportunities for love are vanishingly scarce at best. Because (IMHO) sexual and erotic desire must precede love, I no longer can fall in love with someone. I do not desire men my age. They are not sexually attractive to me.  If, when I was much younger, I had truly loved someone, and had aged alongside him, that wouldn’t be an issue. We’d have our whole history together to draw upon. But without the initial stages of sexual desire and erotic desire to start off with, love of a monogamous, coupling nature is not going to happen for me. In my life, I’ve moved well beyond the time when this could have happened.

So my current task is to deal with the resentment. I must learn to live with my life (the unavoidable factors I was born into, such as a fundamentalist family, a small town milieu, etc., and the poor choices I made along the way, such as sticking with infatuation relationships when they should’ve been dropped) and move beyond the resentment. I must admit that the resentment runs deep, and is tangled up with my religious upbringing, my regressive childhood social milieu and a host of other factors. It may very well be that letting go of the resentment is a major component of my meaning-making tasks in life. To show to myself that having been born in the time and place I was does not need to make my life hopelessly angered and emotionally crippled.

Life Is a Job

I had been dwelling on the difficulty of making life have meaning the other day, when I ran across one short, key sentence in Frankl's The Doctor and the Soul:

Life is a task.

Exactly. Amen. Almost the same words I had been thinking.

I lose patience with people who keep talking about how life is a gift, as if it came wrapped in pretty paper with a cute bow on top, and we open it to find the most awesome playstation/smartphone/lego set/malibu barbie/pony combination imaginable. You insult me when you say life is a gift. Being born a gay child to Christian fundamentalist parents is not a fucking gift. Ever.

Life is not a gift. It's a fucking job.

But it is a job that if you work hard at and keep at it, you can make it somehow meaningful. I believe that you don't have to have been born in fortuitous circumstances to make life have meaning. You don't have to have hit the jackpot of good looks, material comforts, or decent parents. You just have to take whatever you find around you, whatever your circumstances are, and metaphysically macgyver it into something meaningful. And that job is different for every person.

Shift

I took a four day weekend to celebrate being on my own for five years. And while I was out and about, I noticed all the parents, kids and college students stocking up on supplies and clothes for the school year. The beginning of the school year always felt like a renewal of sorts to me (although I wouldn’t have called it such when I was a child). So I ended up using the weekend to turn a psychological corner. I’m calling it the end of summer, but I’m really looking to rein in the hedonism of the past several months.

I don’t want to go into details that are too personal for a public blog. Let me just say that in a final push to exorcise the demons of the relationship I escaped 5 years ago, I let myself be lax on curtailing my pleasures. My weight, among other things, suffered. I’m not the bloated thing I was a year ago, but I was inching back toward that thing.

I have stuff to do. I can’t let my evenings and weekends be totally wasted on shopping, television, etc. I can’t let my brain or my soul go to waste.

I need to be healthy all around.

This comes back to the meaning-making theme I’ve written about. I found out that those who said Frankl said meaning was to be found in work, love or suffering were being too reductive. What Frankl meant was that meaning could be found in creativity-activity, in experience (including but not limited to love) or in suffering (provided the suffering was involuntary and inescapable).

I like this better. I don’t have to try to make my job intrinsically meaningful (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t), nor do I have to luck out and find the right person to love. I can turn activity, creativity or experience into meaning-making happenings.

Still, in reading Frankl, I do tend to react to some of his, shall I say, less than ideal turns of phrase. When he says, for instance, that instead of focusing on what we ask from life, we should focus on what life asks from us, I want to say that life doesn’t have the right to ask that question. If I answer it, I answer it for myself.

Man's Search for Meaning

This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."

—Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006, p. 79-80.

One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus everyone's task is as unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.

—ibid., pp. 108-109.

This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: "Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now."

—ibid., p. 109.

Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

—ibid., p. 111.