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The Alchemy of Suffering: Turning Heartache Into Art
Saying yes to life as an act of courage
‘Your life is your life, don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch, there are ways out.’ — Charles Bukowski
It is easy to be a nihilist. The ever-evolving tragedies of global politics and their real human consequences can lead us to a point of apathy and surrender. Furthermore, at some point, loss and darkness will touch every one of our lives. As we navigate oceans of grief, we can be overcome; we can lose all sense of meaning and purpose. At this point, it can become hard to understand why we should carry on at all. Life is precarious; it guarantees suffering and hardship but also its opposite. To be alive is to drift between these polarities, and as many learn, in these darkest times, we are presented with a choice: a yes or no to life.
A Search for Meaning
In 1942, Viktor Frankl sat in a German concentration camp, his life’s work had been burned, his wife, brother and father killed and the child that he had fathered had been aborted by force by the Nazis. He led the kind of life you could forgive for falling into defeated nihilism.
Yet he didn’t. He found meaning in the book that he would write all over again from scratch. This provided him with the…