How’s Life Treating You?

• 10 years ago

By DONALD DeMARCO

The question, “How’s life treating you,” is one we hear often enough. And, as is the case with many commonly heard statements, it is philosophically far richer than what it may appear to be on the surface. In fact, it holds the key to that vexing and perennial philosophical question, “What is the meaning of life?”

“How is life treating you” presupposes a distinction between your life, which you are experiencing, and you who are the subject of your life’s experiences. You are, in some way, prior to your life.

Life is somehow external to you and imposes itself on you in ways that you may not like. Your life is not always what you want it to be. Indeed, it often seems alien to you, almost as if it were an enemy. During times when life opposes your reasonable plans or even assaults you, you may very well ask the question, “What is the meaning of life?”

In more philosophical language, there is, therefore, a distinction between my being and my life. My being is like a small craft set in a sea that can be, at times, calm, and at other times, quite stormy. We all recognize this precarious situation and that is why, upon greeting each other, we often ask, “How are you?” “How is it going?” or “How is life treating you?” We see each other as potential victims of life’s vicissitudes and offer our sympathy and solicitude.

Life may imperil my being. On the other hand, it may awaken in me a strong desire to safeguard my being and even to respond to life’s difficulties by strengthening and developing it. According to the great poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Talent is nurtured in solitude; character in the stormy billows of the world.”

In his classic, The Revolt of the Masses, existentialist philosopher José Ortega y Gasset enlarges the point: “The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awaken and mobilize my activities, my capacities. If my body was not a weight to me, I should not be able to walk. If the atmosphere did not press on me, I should feel my body as something vague, flabby, unsubstantial.”

Viktor Frankl’s universally acclaimed book, Man’s Search for Meaning, is a reflection on how people can develop character under the most horrendous conditions, specifically, in his case, those of Auschwitz. For the noted psychiatrist, “What man needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

In other words, the difficulties of life are intimately bound up with its meaning. Dr. Frankl beautifully encapsulated his philosophy by stating, “What is to give light must endure burning.”

Just as a strong opponent challenges an athlete to train hard and develop appropriate skills, the challenges of life can arouse in us a determination to transcend life’s obstacles and become a more complete person. John Keats, in a celebrated letter he wrote to his family two years before he died, drew a distinction between a “mere intelligence” and a personalized “Soul.”

“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is,” he wrote, “to school an intelligence and make it a soul?” We inhabit, according to the great lyric poet, a world whose purpose is the art of “soul-making” where “the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways.”

We know that it takes a great deal of pressure to produce a diamond. In a similar vein, personality is formed in the existential crucible of meaningful stress.

What, then, is the meaning of life? It is to arouse people from lassitude and goad them into becoming an authentic person — a “soul,” in Keats’ terminology; “meaning” for Frankl; self-realization for Ortega; “character” for Goethe — in which one’s being begins to approximate what it was intended to become — a fully developed person. For the Christian, the Way of the Cross is the path to one’s personal perfection.

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(Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth & Charity Forum.)