Life: back from España, with philosophical ramblings

I’m back.

It’s hard to know what to say.

In some respects it is as though I’d never left: the smell of my office, the people on campus, my wonderful housemates. My twenty days in Spain came and went so quickly, far too quickly. Eventually I’ll post something of a travel log, but for now there are some selected photos. Now I need to hit the ground running – class changes to address, notes to prepare, enrollment numbers leaping (from 120 to 158 now), my own studies to commence, and still I haven’t fully unpacked from my move across town a month ago. And yet so much of me is still in Spain with Ana…

Of course my worries are quaint; I have no need for food, I needn’t fear war or other violence around me. I live in relative peace and security, for which I am grateful. And such it is for most of us: if you have the luxury of reading a blog you are almost surely amongst the wealthiest 10% of the world’s population… All this is just to say that we always need perspective when worrying about our future or our current problems. And then we need to turn our worries into action (thereby overcoming them), or simply let them go.

I don’t have the exact quote from Victor Frankl just now, but he says something like, “we all suffer in life, but what we must do is to make our suffering meaningful.” That is, simply by virtue of living, we have our troubles – the key for us is to take from them two things. First is our identity; our struggles are unique and they make us who we are in life. Those who live up to challenges are heroes, exemplars. Second is meaning: the story we tell to make sense of our life. Meaning is as unique as identity, but unlike identity it has the power to propel us forward beyond our current struggles because our story has an open ending that we fill with our own hopes, loves, and dreams. When we see our suffering in terms of meaning, it suddenly looks different – our suffering is no longer a roadblock in life, but rather part of the process of becoming who we are.