For the past several weeks, I have been plagued by a glute and hamstring injury. It happened after a ten-mile run that left my right upper leg area tight and sore. I tried to run but it was too painful, so I only walked for several days. I then ran a mile and walked the remainder of my normal six-mile route. Each day, I added another running mile until I achieved running all six miles. There was still soreness afterwards and my running stride shortened which caused my per mile time to increase by at least 45 seconds. My brain still wanted to run but my body was injured. I really need to stop running and heal but I don’t want to get out-of-shape. Due to COVID-19, I have few safe exercise options.
I am suffering both physically and mentally due to my muscular injury. I have been blessed with few sports injuries during my 40 years of running. The thought of not running depresses me and I am not sure how to properly heal except to stop running and perhaps go to physical therapy. This summer, I read Viktor E. Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning (Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 2006). Frankl (1905-1997) was a Jewish Austrian psychiatrist who survived four different concentration camps, including Auschwitz. His parents, brother, and pregnant wife did not survive. My current sports injury suffering is not worthy of mention compared to Frankl’s suffering. Yet, Frankl found meaning from suffering. “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.” (page 67)
People throughout history have searched for the meaning of life. Frankl quoted a large John Hopkins University statistical survey of college students. “Asked what they considered ‘very important’ to them now, 16 percent of the students checked ‘making a lot of money’; 78 percent said their first goal was ‘finding a purpose and meaning to my life.’” (page 100)
Frankl observed people in the worst of human conditions. He was a trained medical doctor with an observant mind. Instead of mentally escaping the suffering, he decided to view suffering as an opportunity. Prisoners “forgot that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.” (page 72)
Frankl reversed the question of the meaning of life. “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” (page 77)
Frankl’s recommended path to finding meaning is through directing your energy outward towards others. “The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.” (pages 110-111)
He offers three ways to discover the meaning of life:
- by creating a work or doing a deed;
- by experiencing something or encountering someone; and
- by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. (page 111)
While I am hopeful that my running injury will eventually heal, I know that there will be future suffering in my life. Suffering is part of life, just as life has moments of joy and happiness. “What never can be ruled out is the unavoidability of suffering. In accepting this challenge to suffer bravely, life has a meaning up to the last moment, and it retains this meaning literally to the end.” (page 114)
