He who has a “why” to live for can bear almost any “how.” 

― Friedrich Nietzsche 

Welcome to our second to last chapter! I hope that working through the PATH process in creating your poster has been a valuable experience for you. This process can be a wonderful way to chart your course to a better future and apply what you have learned in this challenge. It may good to know that you can shift and change and create another PATH poster as you gain more perspective on your life, different things happen in your life, or as you meet new challenges or see new opportunities. 

The main thing is that the PATH process can give you permission to dream, identify goals and ways to accomplish them, and use what you have learned to make it happen. One very important thing I want to make sure you take time to do is to follow through in inviting and enrolling people on your “dream team” to support, encourage, and help you make progress. Even though you may hesitate to ask, giving someone else the chance to help you make the most of your life can bring great meaning to theirs. 

All of which brings us to today’s topic, Meaning and Purpose, which is the last lesson before our review and celebration in the final chapter of this challenge. Meaning and Purpose is the only thing that is both included as a strength in the VIA classification and also included as one of the elements of PERMA. So, it can be both a strength that is a means to an end and also an end that we seek for its own sake. In fact, you might even think about meaning and purpose as the very essence of a life worth living. 

I’ve talked about the role that Viktor Frankl played in bringing meaning and purpose to the forefront of positive psychology. There is an interesting fact about his well-known book titled Man’s Search for Meaning. This is where he writes about how a sense of meaning and purpose enabled him survive four concentration camps in Nazi Germany and about his approach to helping people increase the meaning in their lives. 

In the early years of positive psychology, there was a poll about what was the best positive psychology book. Even though Man’s Search for Meaning was written a half a century before positive psychology was begun by Martin Seligman, it was voted the best book – and for good reason. There are more than a few memorable things that Frankl has to say that demonstrates the insights and wisdom you can find in that book. One is how he expands on a famous quote by Friedrich Nietzsche where he says that, “those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear almost any ‘how’.” 

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl writes about one of the biggest things that gave him a “why” to bear how to make it through the horrors he experienced in those concentration camps. He wrote about how having to trudge through the mud on the many cold and rainy days to do the meaningless work, led to exhaustion and death for many of his fellow prisoners. He wrote about what gave him the meaning to endure so many of the horrible days when those around his lost the will to live. 

He would imagine and hold in his mind one of the greatest gifts that he believed he had received and made his life worth living – the love of his wife. Even though he didn’t know if she was even still alive, it was the thought there could be a love like that which kept him alive. It preserved his will to live and gave him a reason to go on and write a book about the power of meaning and purpose so you and I could read about it today. 

The other big thing that Frankl has to say lies that the heart of this challenge and brings us back to the poet Mary Oliver’s big question: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”. That is one famous question in the form of a quote and here is Frankl’s famous answer in the same form. 

He said this in three simple lines: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

The purpose of this challenge is to help you see that space, the power of the choice can make and, if you are willing to make it, help you develop a vision and plan for what to do with the opportunity for growth and freedom you have in your one wild and precious life. 

Before finishing this chapter, there are three things I want to say about how meaning and purpose can help us answer this question. 

First, the kind of meaning and purpose we are talking about today is not the same as the pleasure that so many associate with happiness. Pleasure and positive emotions can be wonderful gifts of life that are worth appreciating and being grateful for as we discussed in the last chapter. But if pleasure was the only thing that was important to Frankl, he may not have survived to go on to write that book. If it were all that we sought, then there might be many things that bring meaning to our lives that we might never do – like having kids, going for college, being a caregiver, serving our country, taking a stand for what we believe in, or having many of the goals and dreams that we express when we write about our best possible life or complete a PATH poster. 

Meaning is more than just pleasure and it enables us not only to survive but to thrive. It gives us something to live for even when pleasure can be so hard to find – like during a pandemic, when we have chronic pain or a chronic illness, when our relationship ends, when we lose a loved one, or when we don’t get that promotion. When pleasure is waning like it may at times during our periods of greatest stress; it is the meaning we get from those special people, experiences, places, and projects in our lives that make all the difference, get us through, and make it all worth it. 

Second, although the kind of meaning and purpose we are talking about can be found in spirituality and organized religion, it is not necessarily the same thing and can also be found in other ways. The word religion has come to be associated with groups of people who organize their lives around a traditional set of beliefs and practices. The word spirituality has come to take on a different, broader meaning sometimes associated with God or a higher power – but increasingly more often with nature, the universe, or a higher cause or purpose. 

The kind of meaning and purpose we are talking about here may or may not involve organized religion and related forms of spirituality, but it does involve is something that makes us want to be alive, get up in the morning, and follow the advice that Robin William tells his class in the Dead Poet Society: “carpe diem,” which is Latin for “seize the day!” 

Third, like the love Victor Frankl experiences from his wife, to have that sense of meaning and purpose – or even to be on the quest to find it, can enable us to focus our lives in a world where we are pulled in so many directions, and put us on a path to making the most of our lives. There are several ways that I have tried to enable you to do this in this challenge. I have tried to encourage you to find what you love to do, what your strengths are, who and what you are grateful for, what kinds of causes you want to be involved with and give back to, and what you most want your life to be like in the future. 

Viktor Frankl has given us the gift of being able to see our lives not only as the pursuit of pleasure, but of the things that can inspire and motivate us through the hardest of times, bring lasting gratification and reward – not only to survive but also to thrive and flourish – and to truly make our lives worth living! 

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter 

The tasks are designed to enable you to better understanding and foster meaning and purpose in your life and think about how you can share the benefits of what you have learned in this challenge with others: 

First, there is a special video about Viktor Frankl titled Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl/Core Message” about the importance of meaning in life. Watching this and reflecting on it can be a good way to think about how meaning might be a part of the future you may want to work towards. 

Second, there is a task that involves writing about the most meaningful things that you learned or did as part of this challenge and how they might change your life for the better. 

Third, there are reflection questions about how your life might be different if you focused more time and energy on what brings meaning and purpose to your life. Identifying and focusing on the benefits of a more meaningful life will help motivate you to achieve it. 

Fourth, there is a task about “paying it forward” that involves writing about how you can pass what you have learned about and done in the challenge on to others and make expressing gratitude and kindness a bigger part of your life.