Occupy Stillness. Viktor Frankl: the challenge of potential meaning to fulfill

November 20, 2011.

Still Sundays.

The New York City skyline never gets old.

I am getting older; I like it.

Love too never gets old.

This month is over, this year is over, my obsession with time, truth, and love continues.

What do I want to be when I grow up? A writer? A doctor? A teacher? A lawyer? A writer? This time I get to decide how I want to be, not who based on what.

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 People have recurring dreams. I don’t.

My latest obsession is putting into words this “recent” dream: I am in a field of teal colored dragonflies. They are everywhere. The field is on the edge of a horizon or so it feels. I have a map but I give it back to this man whom I call the Wizard. He says we don’t need a map. We jump off the horizon on a net made of these dragonflies and we are in awe at the number of shades that exist within the color blue. The dream repeats itself so I can note details. The dream repeats itself so I can note details. I wake up remembering very little other than I should google the south of France.

My search yields images that pale in comparison to the colors in my dream. But I am not worried. Sooner or later I will come across a painting or drawing or photo that will be a déjà vu recognizing and words will come from a place that is beyond me.

My compulsion to put images, thoughts, and ideas into words keeps growing at an exponential rate. Untruths created free from the reigns of accountability are some blood and I am perpetually thirsty to understand. But I don’t want to harm anyone as I suck the marrow for what’s real. My compulsion to lift the curtain of fantasy comes from knowing the real is more fascinating, more powerful, more magical, and unparalleled than all the seductive escapes. The greatest story is the one you will actually live if you drop the script. Metaphors and symbols exist to help us understand but when we become more fixated on the metaphor than what the metaphor is attempting to show then we are deluded in living through metaphors than being one.

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Away from the Internet for a day I returned to discover videos and photos of an officer in riot gear blasting pepper spray into the faces of seated protesters at a northern California university, UC Davis.

It is standard law enforcement procedure preferred to touching, shoving, and kicking to force a body of people to leave premises. Leaving the field of “right”—the police have to honor laws which provide for protecting the rights of others who may not want to protest, including property rights—-and “wrong”—the protestors have a right to protest and unnecessary force was used—behind, I was perplexed to learn every other article reporting “calls for the chancellor’s resignation” and how she is accountable. What struck me was how challenging it was for me to find a single news report where I could get facts. Just facts. All I wanted was a report offering what actually took place. I don’t doubt that even in such a report there would be some bias because observations remain subjective despite our objective attempts but it would be better than sensationalizing non-facts!

This particular protest to “occupy” UC Davis campus may appear different than what actually began at Wall Street months ago against the corporations. However, at the core this too is primarily about injustice. I am quite familiar with the bureaucratic nature of academic institutions that feel no different than the 1% of corporations. That being said, want to occupy UC Davis or any other campus? Find a way to learn that doesn’t require a stamp of approval by them. More than half the people who attend colleges do so not to attain “higher education” but just to get a degree, pressure from parents, or because that is what “I am supposed to do.” I am all about learning but you can’t occupy a system before you can accept why you are part of the system in the first place.

When a single movement initially about one thing becomes a movement about many things there is great momentum but also great danger. Occupy these colleges that just want to make money and not provide any education. Occupy these tenured professors who don’t care about teaching. Occupy the tuition raises that still don’t allow one to sign up for classes one actually wants. Occupy these police officers who are protecting the corporations, the chancellors. Occupy the restaurant I can’t afford. Occupy self-defense with a gun.

When I pull back and look at the big picture I see an outrage about injustice, where your hard work doesn’t count anymore, where nepotism has hijacked possibilities. Possibilities were exactly what made United States unlike any other country.

It breaks my heart to see how so many are missing the point. When we lose sight of the fact that a police officer too is angry that he has not had a pay raise in years despite his long shifts and yet he still has to do his job or he would be without one and he has a family, when we lose sight of the fact that a student who is protesting is angry because he can’t afford the loan rates to continue his education alongside a student who comes from a privileged life where his only anger is about being bored, when we lose sight of the fact that it is more complex than “us” against “them” then we lose permanently. Instead of evolution away from the system that has us all locked down we offer proof that we need a system to keep us in check.

A few years before our immigration to the United States, when I was eight, the events in my little environment became most unusual. An uproar had erupted in the Islamic world following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. The Saudi religious police, Muttawas, came searching for “the book” in our house.  Since we had a big library and apparently they couldn’t distinguish my parents’ books from the children’s books, they removed and tore random books and magazines.  It made little sense to me then but the aforementioned incidents became the corner stones of my future intellectual development. Words fail me when I attempt to describe the jubilation our family felt when my father was finally granted a visa for the United States.  Freedom gives one an extraordinary energy.  A power within awakens. And I have never lost sight of that power that there is always a choice that anything is possible.

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 This Sunday I share a few passages I re-read in Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

To be sure, man’s search for meaning may arouse inner tension rather than inner equilibrium. However, precisely such tension is an indispensable prerequisite of mental health. There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worse conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.

[…] that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensible to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill.

[…]I turn to the detrimental influence of that feeling of which so many patients complain today, namely, the feeling of the total and ultimate meaningless of their lives. They lack the awareness of a meaning worth living for. They are haunted by the experience of their inner emptiness, a voice within themselves.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly brining to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.

Let us consider, for instance, “Sunday neurosis,” that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.

Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure.

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

 What will define the occupy movement as successful?

What is it that you do when you “tweet”, “heart”, “like”, “create”,  that is dedicated to a greater cause than yourself (not withstanding that perhaps understanding oneself is essential before one can even think beyond oneself)?

I was reminded last night by my sister that just being honest—I know quite impossible given we are under constant pressure to be a certain way and by way of escaping that pressure we come to social media for connecting but that too becomes a performance—and kind—the balance between keeping it real yet compassionate—is as much for something beyond yourself as any other great ambition.

When I understand I let go. When I let go I can zoom off into the peacock blue sky where I know what we are made of.

If we can learn to occupy stillness, the tension we run from, the rest will follow.

~a. q. s.

Note: I will be occupying stillness next Sunday and the following Sunday and will not create time to share what I find during those Sundays as I will be traveling. I will resume writing on Sunday, December 11th. Wishing you a Thanksgiving holiday filled with gratitude that occupies all that really matters to you.

Related posts:

“For the meaning of life differs…from hour to hour” ~ Viktor Frankl Still Sundays Vintage Stillness