As Virginia and I worked on The Blind Visionary, we talked about a number of writers who influenced our thinking.  Two of the most important are Viktor Frankl and Reynolds Price.  You might recall that Dr. Viktor Frankl spent years as a prisoner in Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps in World War II, losing his new young wife and his father, mother, and brother in the Holocaust.  In Man’s Search For Meaning, the first of the many books he wrote over the course of a distinguished career in medicine, Dr. Frankl defines each person’s “meaning” in terms of taking action in particular circumstances, no matter how dire they might be.  Frankl believes that there is always an opportunity to act in some fashion, and that such action gives a person’s life meaning.  “Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them.  In other words, man is ultimately self-determining.  Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.”

To Viktor Frankl, suffering is one of the paths to meaning, an opportunity to “bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.”  This is what the distinguished novelist Reynolds Price, who died recently, wrote about in his A Whole New Life.  Struggling for four years with an excruciatingly painful tumor inside his spinal cord, Price emerged from the horrible ordeal physically diminished but blessed with an even fuller life.  “So disaster then, yes, for me for a while – great chunks of four years.  Catastrophe surely, a literally upended life with all parts strewn. . . But if I were called on to value honestly my present life beside my past . . .I’d have to say that, despite an enjoyable fifty-year start, these recent years since full catastrophe have gone still better.  They’ve brought more in and sent more out – more love and care, more knowledge and patience, more work in less time.”  Virginia and I see her odyssey as a search for meaning in Frankl’s and Reynolds’ sense of actualizing potentialities under particular circumstances.  To be sure, blindness restricted Virginia’s freedom in various important ways, but under those circumstances, Virginia took resolute action to realize her calling, her tremendous leadership potential, in new ways in a new setting, the Miami Lighthouse For the Blind and Visually Impaired. 

We would love to hear from you about actions you’ve taken under difficult circumstances that have brought richer meaning to your life.