Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I’m sure my legions of faithful readers noticed that I missed BOTH of the two-odd-days-in-a-row that leap year brought us; weekends are hard, you know? And I’ve been working right along on my basement, cleaning out and organizing the big girls’ bedroom so that–eventually–my son won’t have to share with his younger sister. The getting rid of things is the most satisfying, but there’s much more organizing than actual tossing. (Thanks to my grandparents for the thrifty/packrat/borderline hoarder genes.)

Anyway. Tonight I finished listening to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which is the March book for the new book group I’ve more or less joined. To start with, DON’T listen to this book. I wasn’t going to make it through any other way, but the latter part deals with specifics of logotherapy, which Frankl developed, and clinical psychiatric terms and explanations do not lend themselves to an auditory approach. I listened to bits of it three and four and five times, trying to parse out the terms and their meanings in context. Maybe those who are not at all visually oriented would be fine, but the lack of the visual most definitely hindered my comprehension. (Then, too, it’s been a couple of decades since my brain was in optimal shape for this sort of reading. It gets a different kind of exercise now.)

Anyway. Essentially, in Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl uses his experiences in the Nazi concentration camps to explain and support his brainchild, logotherapy, which postulates that human beings are most motivated by a search for meaning. Finding meaning in suffering will therefore help us through the suffering, inspiring us to “suffer well”. Much of his approach rang true to me, and I appreciated the (relative) accessibility of it. (The fact that I was able to grasp it via an auditory experience, without any visual whatsoever, is proof of that.) This is not the sort of book I usually pick up, but I’m glad to have read it; it’s been on my radar in a “someday I’ll get to that” sort of way for a very long time. Be aware that this is not a memoir, but rather a book to be shelved in the social sciences section of a bookstore; that said, since a goodly portion of the book draws on Frankl’s experiences in the camps, it feels like a cousin to memoir. Ultimately, its central assertion is both valuable and relevant in today’s world, and I’m going to be thinking about it–on and off–for a long time to come.