What if our “depression” were our soul’s way of saying, “You are on the wrong path—you’re not making enough art, or loving the world enough, or loving yourself enough?”
What if instead of trying to stifle the voice of our soul, we paid a little more attention? What if we asked that dark beast that leaps out of the jungle of our psyche, “Okay, what are you trying to tell me?”
What if it answered, “Your life is perfect, it’s your way of seeing it that is causing the pain.” Victor Frankl was a prominent psychiatrist and scholar who was put on a train to Aushwitz. The Nazis killed his wife and, oddly, he found a sense of transcendent spirituality when everything that he thought mattered in life was stripped away. He stopped “trying” to survive and focused on doing what he could as a doctor to help others. He even thought he was about to be freed and allowed others to take his place (and all those that got on the bus were not taken to the Red Cross but rather trapped in a building and burned). Frankl wrote about his experiences in “Man’s Search For Meaning,” and I would highly recommend this book to anyone who thinks that their life is so bleak that no one in such a situation could find happiness out of it.
Let’s dedicate today to compassion to all who are not happy in their situation, in the service of your own personal wishes as well as in the service of all our collective children.
Namaste, Bruce
