Last week, I checked out from the Library Victor Frankl’s classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning, now with over 16 million copies sold. (Think about that for a minute. If you had a penny for every book sold of those books, you would be $160,000 richer!) The foreword to the book by Harold Kushner summarizes Frankl’s thesis this way:
“Frankl’s most enduring insight, one that I have called on often in my own life and in countless counseling situations: Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.
There is a scene in Arthur Miller’s play Incident at Vicy in which an upper-middle-class professional man appears before a Nazi authority that has occupied his town and shows his credentials: his university degrees, his letters of reference from prominent citizens, and so on. The Nazi asks him, ‘Is that everything you have?’ The man nods. The Nazi throws it all in the wastebasket and tells him, ‘Good, now you have nothing. ‘The man whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed. Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.”
I’m looking forward to reading the entire book.
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