Waiting, Looking, Searching
Finding meaning in tragedy
A Poem-Song
Waiting, looking, searching for answers now uncertain to be found.
Wishing, wanting, yearning for shoots of new beginnings on the ground.
But the winter takes it toll, and some will not be sheltered from the cold.
Weathered, worn and beaten, they struggle with the answers they are told:
Save their lives, spare their lives, what else could even matter any more!
Save their lives, spare their lives, just cut the empty chatter, and do more!
This is their fate for certain, too late to to make a difference anyway.
We gaze upon the scene, with no mean intent somehow we never meant to leave them freezing.
“What’s done is done,” they said, no use in mourning for the dead, our lives will soon be better, you will see.
What good is this, you mention, we are filled with good intention, it doesn’t bring them back again to me.
Save their lives, spare their lives, what else could even matter any more!
Save their lives, spare their lives, just cut the empty chatter, and do more!
Why do you not agree, we have endured a tragedy. When will you see it matters more to me
than drinks and celebrations or empty victories or adulation from the enemy!
Save their lives, spare their lives, what else could even matter any more!
Save their lives, spare their lives, just cut the empty chatter, and do more!
For Viktor Frankl, it was a matter of finding a “why” to survive, a meaning to life that could push him and others through tremendous suffering.
For us, the challenge is to find the meaning of saving the lives of others, and preventing tragedy before, so we might prevent the suffering of new Frankls after we have failed to be aware of them. And in that meaning, to find hope now rather than later, when the damage has been done.
Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” He describes poignantly those prisoners who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.
Viktor E. Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning (p. ix). Kindle Edition.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death…amzn.to
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