New Meaning for a New Year

This is the time of year when people want to do something different in a New Year.  They want to re-do something that hasn’t worked before or do something else anew. 

For 2010, rather than just doing something, consider making the doing something of meaning.   I was reading Daniel Pink’s take on this in his book “A Whole New Mind”.   A few of the sentances below are from that book.

In winter of 1942 the Nazi’s were bulldozing Eastern Europe in their ravenous hunt and extermination of Jews.  A young psychologist, Victor Frankl and his wife, Tilly were living in Vienna .  They knew their time was short and were making preparations when the Authorities came to “relocate” them to Auschwitz .  They were taking great pains to preserve their most important possessions.  Victor was writing a book about his theories and discoveries of the human mind.  Before the Police stormed their apartment Tilly sewed the manuscript into the lining of Victor’s coat.

Victor and Tilly were dispatched to Auschwitz and were soon stripped of all their possessions including the coat and manuscript.  The SS separated them too.  Over the next three years, Victor saw his wife, mother, father, and brother being marched into the gas chamber. 

Frankl endured beatings, starvation, working in the winter fields of Poland shoeless, and sleeping in drafty barracks huddle in masses to keep warm while exhausted people urinated and defecated in the same huddled mass.  He labored to recreate his manuscript by stealing scraps of paper and scratching notes in secret.  In 1946 the Allied Forces liberated the concentration camps.  That stash of crumpled notes formed the basis of what would become a seminal work that today is referenced and hallowed by scholars as well as the spirituals.  That book is “Man’s Search for Meaning”.

In that book Frankl describes how he persevered in face of devastating labor, sadistic guards, and scant food.  In one chapter he describes receiving a cup of water with a fish head in it.  He wrote of his feeling of gratitude for that bit of sustenance.   However, the book is more than just a Nazi camp survival narrative.  It speaks about the calling of the human soul and is a guide to the meaning of life.  Frankl posits that “man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid pain, but rather to see a meaning in his life.”

Fankl’s theories in his early manuscript, while still free in Vienna , were put to the test in the abject depravity of Auschwitz .  He found they still held true even under the most unimaginable hostile circumstances.  Frankl writes, “ I understand how a man who has nothing left in the world still can know bliss.”

Victor Frankl was liberated from the torturous setting and went on to become a famed and influential psychologist and speaker.  But he also found his liberation that camp.  He found that finding “meaning” is the only meaningful undertaking in life.

As you we go into this New Year, let us make the commitment that what ever we choose to do, that it be meaningful and that the meaning of it will be its own reward.  In a phrase,…In all your doing, BE MEANINGFUL!