What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

viktor frankl (Man’s Search For Meaning, p.166)

However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.

 muriel rukeyser

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

carl jung

Disregard for those who are smaller and weaker is the best defence against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helplessness:  it is an expression of this split-off weakness.  The strong person who–because he has experienced it–knows that he, too, carries this weakness within himself does not need to demonstrate his strength through contempt.

 alice miller  drama of the gifted child (p72)

[There is] a juncture to which full awareness inevitably leads. One stands before the abyss and decides how to face the pitiless existential facts of life. Of course, there are no solutions. One has a choice only to be ‘resolute,’ ‘engaged,’ courageously defiant, stoically accepting or to, in awe of mystery, place one’s trust in the providence of the divine.

 

irv yalom, love’s executioner