Meaning in every moment

Viktor Frankl believed that many people suffer because their life has no meaning. How de we find meaning in life? Maybe there is no single big ‘Meaning’ in everyone’s life. Maybe it’s simply a lot of little meanings.

 “… consider a movie: it consists of thousands upon thousands of individual pictures, and each of them makes sense and carries a meaning, yet the meaning of the whole film cannot be seen before its last sequence is shown. However, we cannot understand the whole film without having first understood each of its components, each of the individual pictures.

Isn’t it the same with life? Doesn’t the final meaning of life, too, reveal itself, if at all, only at its end, on the verge of death?

And doesn’t this final meaning, too, depend on whether or not the potential meaning of each single situation has been actualized to the best of the respective individual’s knowledge and belief?

… The fact remains that meaning, and its perception, as seen from the logotherapeutic angle, is completely down to earth rather than afloat in the air or resident in an ivory tower.Sweepingly, I would locate the cognition of meaning —of the personal meaning of a concrete situation—midway between an “aha” experience along the lines of Karl Biihler’s concept and a Gestalt perception, say, along the lines of Max Wertheimer’s theory.… the perception of meaning, as I see it, more specifically boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or, to express it in plain words, to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation.

Viktor Frankl, concentration camp survivor, founder of Logotherapy, in Man’s search for meaning.