Meaning

Unavoidable personal suffering
It’s acceptance leads to solution.

Unavoidable personal events
It’s willlessness delivers flow.

Each life differs different,
Each meaning is personal.

All people differ innerly,
All receive different answers.

To become this life’s flow
is a pure personal way.

Each to his own talent,
to his own sensitivity.

Greatest personal suffering
is the gate to inner gold.

It constitutes the protection
most precious to individual life.

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Discovering meaning

According to Frankl, "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; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering" and that "everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances".^[7] On the meaning of suffering, Frankl gives the following example:

Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now how could I help him? What should I tell him? I refrained from telling him anything, but instead confronted him with a question, "What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?:" "Oh," he said, "for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!" Whereupon I replied, "You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it is you who have spared her this suffering; but now, you have to pay for it by surviving and mourning her." He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left the office.^[8]

— Viktor Frankl