Life's Transitoriness
Those things that seem to take meaning away from human life include not only suffering but dying as well. I never tire of saying that the only really transitory aspects of life are the potentialities; but as soon as they are actualized, they are rendered realities at that very moment; they are saved and delivered into the past, wherein they are rescued and preserved from transitoriness. For, in the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything is irrevocably stored.
Thus, the transitoriness of our existence in no way makes it meaningless. But it does constitute our responsibleness; for everything hinges upon our realizing the essentially transitory responsibilities. Man constantly makes his choice concerning the mass of present potentialities; which of these will be condemned to nonbeing and which will be actualized? Which choice will be made an actuality once and forever, an immortal "footprint in the sand of time?" At any moment, man must decide, for better or for worse, what will be the monument of his existence.
Usually, to be sure man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had savaged once and for all his deeds, his joys, and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.
Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively we might say:
The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadness that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day.
On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all life he has already lived to the fullest.
What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him?
"No, thank you," he will think.
"Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things which cannot in spite envy."
This excerpt is taken from:
Frankl, E. Viktor. Man's Search For Meaning. Beacon Press, 2006. Page 120-121.
