Good Morning and Happy New Year!! Here’s to new beginnings and a positive start. Since it’s the holiday, I’ll keep today’s edition short and sweet so we can all enjoy the day off to its fullest.

Today, for our main course, we’re going to look at how suffering enables us to grow and transform, through the mind of Viktor Frankl. To burn that off, we’ll do an exercise that reframes how we approach “meaning.” Wrapping it up in our Book Nook, we’ll open up Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

Have a seat. Thought Breakfast is served!

Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning immediately after his Holocaust imprisonment. It’s important, when interpreting his book, that it’s just that; an interpretation, not a trauma spectacle.

It can be easy to get wrapped in the emotional weight of the account of a Holocaust survivor, but that leads us to misinterpret his message: that life is meaningful even in suffering.

While he was imprisoned, Frankl shifted the question from “Why did this happen to me?” to “Who am I called to become through this?”

We can easily see how suffering can harden, numb, and break a person. Frankl, however, uses it as an opportunity for awakening. He uses the idea of meaning as the difference between the impacts that suffering can have on a person.

Meaning, to Frankl, is interior orientation. Frankl claims that humans can endure almost anything if they know what it is for (like Nietzsche: he who has a why can bear almost any how).

This shows up in daily life. A parent sacrifices sleep for their child (suffering interpreted as love). Athletes endure painful training (suffering as purpose). At one point or another, every human is stricken with grief (suffering as remembrance).

The contrast here is that meaningless pain leads to despair, while meaningful pain leads us to dignity.

Bring to mind one difficulty that you’re bringing into this new year.

Ask yourself just three questions:

“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning—such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”
- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Frankl doesn’t say that suffering disappears. He says that it changes character when it: becomes love, responsibility, witness, or fidelity to what matters.

Meaning doesn’t remove the load of suffering, but changes how we carry it.

Munch on that for today. Ask yourself what difficulty has shaped you more than success ever could, and use that to propel yourself into this new year. We can’t always choose our suffering, but we can always choose what we become through the suffering. Have a great holiday, and come back tomorrow for another steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!

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Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast