Substance - Frankl on growing old...

"I should say having been is the surest kind of being." ~Victor Frankl

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In a previous blog post I quoted a paragraph on "transitoriness" from Victor Frankl's book, Man's Search for Meaning.
Not until a day or so after I blogged that paragraph did I read beyond it in the book.

As I read...
My heart grew wings.
My being was lifted.
My cares were lighter.
I felt at peace with the past and the present and the future.
A line from John Denver's song Rocky Mountain High rolled through my head, "you might say [s]he was born again."

Frankl's main theme on life is finding one's purpose and meaning, even in suffering.
The question is not, what is the meaning of life?
But rather, what is an individual's purpose or meaning?

In the Life's Transitoriness section, Frankl shares an analogy of a person figuratively tearing off calendar pages day after day and writing a few notes about one's life on the back of each torn-off page, and then filing the page neatly away with its predecessors.

When I read his analogy I thought, "I've done that, literally...with journaling."
In that moment, my journals meant something.
They have substance.
They aren't meaningless and nothingness.
It's okay that they sit on my book shelves.
It's okay that I don't commit them to ashes, as some well-meaning people (and I mean that sincerely) have suggested.

Frankl's words give my past a substance I don't think I'd previously felt.
In a sense it's like one can live in the past, present, and future simultaneously.
All three happen almost simultaneously.

Below I've transcribed the section entitled Life's Transitoriness from Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

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Life's Transitoriness

Those things which seem to take meaning away from human life include not only suffering but dying as well. I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from tansitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.

Thus, the transitoriness of our existence in no way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory possibilities. Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentialities; which of these will be condemned to nonbeing and which will be actualized? Which choice will be made an actuality once and forever, an immortal "footprint in the sands of time"? At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.

Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.

Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively we might say: The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reason has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? "No, thank you," he will think.

"Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy."

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[Victor Frankl developed "logotherapy" which is "a form of psychotherapy that is based on helping clients to find a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives."]