Checking Back In

Well, hello there. It's been a few months since I have seen your white, blank, "new post" page and thin black blinking cursor asking for thoughts to form into grammar. Feels good to be back.

I've had many a fleeting thought to write about these past few months but laziness is a terrible attribute and it tends to win over the thought of writing. I have been admittedly over extending myself in my tireless efforts to achieve, that I have left nary (yep- i said nary) a time for my own transcription of thought.

What I'd like to write about tonight is one of the books I am reading. It's a small book, both in size and in length- but could possibly be one of the most influential I have read. It is called "Man's Search for Meaning" and is authored by Viktor E. Frankl. Frankl was a survivor of the Nazi prison camps and was an influential psychiatrist and neurologist. The book was written in 1959. It is a very unassuming little treasure that I picked up for $1 from an elderly lady at a neighborhood-wide yard sale in Richmond last month. How lucky I was.

I won't go into a book review but suffice to say that this is an influential and life changing book. Not only is it a virtual panacea of thought and revelation in the psychological sense, but it discusses the very nature of life, death, and the human spirit.

Frankl writes of a time in which he was out in the trenches in his prison camp hacking away at the snowy ground. He was conversing mentally with his wife, who had perished, about the purpose of "sufferings, and slow dying". Suddenly, he felt his "spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom" and sensed an answer to his internal inquiry as to whether there was existence of an ultimate purpose. He felt decidedly that the answer was "yes". At the same time he felt this revelation, he looked out into the horizon and saw a quaint and peaceful farmhouse. Though the horizon and sky were slate gray, there was a warm light in the farmhouse. From that moment, Frankl deduced that a light was shining in his darkness:

"Et lux in tenebris lucet"- and the light shineth in the darkness.

I thought very long and meditatively about that story and about the Latin quote that Frankly used to personify it. It defines who I want to be, both personally and professionally. I want to be the light in someone's darkness. I don't want to be a source of sadness, anxiety, distrust, or anger. I want to be light.

If we all are a light to someone else...where could there be dark?