Concept
The three sources of meaning
Frankl's logotherapy locates meaning in three places available to everyone: in what you give to the world, a deed or a piece of work; in what you take from it in encounter, above all love for another person seen as they are; and in the attitude taken toward suffering that cannot be changed.
The first source is creative: something made or done that would not exist without you, and Csikszentmihalyi's flow lives here, since absorbed hours are meaningful when pointed at something. The second is experiential: beauty, nature, and above all another person, loved and seen. The third is the one only a camp survivor could have written, and Frankl is careful about it: it is not that suffering is required for meaning, but that when a situation cannot be altered, a person is still challenged to change themselves, and the way they bear the unbearable can be their achievement. The three are a worksheet. Under three headings, write the deed that is yours this year, the person who is yours to love and see, and the unchangeable thing you carry with the attitude you choose toward it. Frankl's reversal frames the exercise: the question is not what you expect from life but what life is asking of you.
A real-life example
A grieving teacher writes three lines: the reading programme for children who fell behind, her father who has stopped cooking, and her mother's way of noticing people carried on rather than her absence. She cooks with her father on Sunday and opens the reading room in September.
How to use it
- 1Write three lines under three headings: the deed, the person, the attitude toward what cannot change.
- 2Ask what your situation is asking of you, not what you expected from it.
- 3Return to the page when the Sunday-evening emptiness comes; it is a list of tasks, not feelings.