You can’t escape it. Each morning when I slide the paper out of it’s plastic baggie or turn on CNN, there it is: the constant drumbeat of bad news. It rains down on us unmercifully like a torrent. I catch my optimism waning more than I’d like to admit. I think doubt is natural when all the news seems to be bad. All this got me thinking about loss and abundance and I felt like writing about it.
I tend to be self examining by nature. I’m not sure why that it is. I assume everybody self examines but I think we tend to spin and self judge rather than objectively self-examining. There’s a profound difference. I’m no exception. I think that when crisis starts to affect friends and family, it feels like it’s closing it’s grips in on everybody. I think that is what has me spooked. In all of my adult life I’ve never gone a pay period without a check. The only job I ever got fired or let go from was a lousy one selling satellite TV dishes. I hated that job only slightly less than the previous one which was installing the satellite TV dishes. The worst thing about the installation gig was crawling into places that hadn’t been crawled in years. Picking at frozen dirt wishing it would cooperate was low on the fun scale also. The best part was the road trip to the next job because it gave you a chance to warm up a bit in the truck. A decade or so after the manual labor gig, I saw heady days of the dot.com frenzy. This was a time that you really couldn’t get fired if you wanted. In fact pay raises were no harder than walking down to the bosses office and casually mentioning the number of headhunters that had called during the day. With every bubble it seems comes a burst. The world today seems like it’s waking up to ever more perverse hang-overs. Collectively we never seem to fully realize that each stroke of luck and good-fortune within it is contained its opposite. This Taoist concept, try as we might, is inescapable. What we can control however is the grace and the dignity with which we confront each side of this dichotomy.
Unlike today, I feel as though you could get your head around the dot.com bubble. Today’s specter, with antagonists such as “credit default swaps” and “mortgage derivatives” seems different, almost too exotic to explain. It’s also what finance types call a contagion – something that isn’t isolated within a given sector or specific market. No, this seems to be a chain of dominoes that isn’t done toppling over yet. All this reflecting has gotten me thinking and ultimately led me to read a marvelous book by Victor Frankl entitled “Man’s Search for Meaning”. Frankl was a Jewish doctor during WWII. As unthinkable as it was, Frankl, like six million other Jews were summarily rounded up and put into concentration camps. Many, who were too sick or too old, were simply executed in the gas chambers and cremated. Frankl describes in his book where a man’s fate was determined by painfully small and seemingly trivial twists of fate: a simple wave of an SS Officer’s hand, which rail car you were loaded onto, what day of the week it happened to be. Depending on an apparent random mix of unrelated circumstances it was either a right to the work camp and a chance at living or a left to the gas chambers. It was that morbidly simple.
Frankl portrays the concentration camp, Auschwitz in his case, as a character which I found interesting. As unspeakable as the whole “Final Solution” was, Frankl conveys almost reverence because it provides him a living laboratory for investigating the true nature of man. In one notable scene, Frankl and his work crew is marching to the day’s worksite. Because of the extreme conditions, the malnourishment, the cold and disease, the men in his party were in very poor shape. So poor in fact, where there constitutions that many could not wear shoes as their feet were too swollen from the edema. On this particular march, the Jewish prisoners passed a convoy of incarcerated criminals. The emotion that Frankl conveys is one of envy. Even though the criminals were captive, they probably enjoyed at least an occasional shower, reasonably clean sheets and mail from home. The wrongfully imprisoned Jews, many of whom had been men of notable position, had been reduced to nothing but a simple number and subsequently treated with as much respect as a number could commend. These men had literally had everything taken away without exception. They were stripped to the point where they were envious of criminals and prisoners. This is a profound example of stratification and underscores just how dire a situation these people were in.
Where is all of this going? For me, the lesson is simple. I believe we must be very careful about what we declare a loss. I don’t want to sell short what it’s like to loose one’s job and still be faced with a mortgage, car payments and dependents. What I do want to emphasis is our perception of what it really means to live comfortably and how we choose to face adversity. I don’t want to stand on any moral high ground and declare that we quit complaining about our material loss and get over it because loss and suffering is as individualized as anything. It’s a matter of perspective and context. What I will offer however, is what I believe the core message of Frankl’s book is. Near the end of the part of the book where Frankl talks about the liberation of the camps, two powerful themes emerge. One theme is fate and the role it plays in all our lives, amplified of course in the context of the Nazi concentration camps. Even right up until the end, fate nudged the course of events in polar opposite directions. Just before the allies liberated Auschwitz the Germans moved most of the prisoners out of camp to what they were calling “staging camps”. Because of a clerical error, Frankl and a companion didn’t make it on the convoy. They were extremely upset because the staging camp promised a change of clothes and medical aid from the American Red Cross. Cold, dirty and in need of medical care, they waited, angry they missed the chance to get out earlier. Latter they learned that the trucks did stop at an intermediate camp where the prisoners were herded into barracks, locked inside and burned alive by the Nazi SS.
The final lesson for me is a simple one. Frankl speaks at length about the human condition and what man becomes when stripped to an almost sub-primal level. During a retrospective of his imprisonment, Frankl suggests that it’s not so much what happens to us, but rather it all boils down to how we react. As Frankl puts it: “We have a choice as to our way”. So as we go into the new year and we face unavoidable challenges and quite possibly suffering like this generation hasn’t seen, we should keep this in mind.
PJB
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Just read your blog. While the technical postings were beyond my knowledge, the one on Abundance and Gratitude hit home. Yes, given what is and has been happening around the globe, we have a lot about which to the thankful.