Man’s Search for Meaning

When you are left with nothing but yourself sometimes the resolution becomes clear as an end. But what can you do in face of repeated adversity and conditions no man/woman should ever feel?  Viktor Frankl’s answer to this question emerges from personal suffering and having to put up with conditions that threatened his existence. The answer he gives is that one must find a meaning in everything he/she does, even in pain, in simple pleasures and in trial that every life contains.

To be able to create a meaning out of pain is truly an exercise I can only compare to those made by Buddhist monks, because I imagine that only after meditation or intense thought one can accomplish that the essence of all things lies in the purpose that our actions pertain.

The horrors of being in concentration camps in Auschwitz, Dachau and others and afterwards finding out that those people that made you find a purpose for the pains endured are dead can be hard to live with. And wet his theory of finding a purpose for all there is to life, to ones life, give him strength to carry on living, to find people, things and action that can fulfill the need for meaning, a personal purpose to an individual life.

The book was really inspiring and made me think and realize the meaning behind my actions, and the purpose of chosen paths in life. It made me more aware and more responsible and yet it made me free. I strive to find the purpose of my life, the meaning of my actions and to endure with courage and optimism all that lies ahead in the great unknown of my life.

I also started reading about logotherapy and found it very useful in my work.

"Risipitorii" / (The Wasters)

Being young is always seen as something similar to being free and able to take any course of action or make any decision. Youth is not seen as a period of confusion, indecision or inability to do great things in life. M. Preda sees the young adults as individuals who take great decision easily and are sometimes stunned by small ones.

“Risipitorii”/ The Wasters is a novel of a brief period in anyone’s life, when major decision are prone to take place and some of the decisions made are haste and have an effect that contours the entire life. Decision taken too easily can make an impact on people triggering turning points in a persons search for purpose in life. A young woman who marries a young doctor without having a clear idea about married life, finds herself, after an abortion, left for another woman, and thus seems to forget the purpose of her existence. In the confusion set by her depression she learns to enjoy life once more and knows that from now on she will forever keep a mark of what it means to be without meaning, but will continue to live for a meaning discovered as life succeeds this crisis.

Other crises are described, for instance the meaning of living with the person you love, can appear for those who live it complicated, and yet simple for those seeing it from outside. The search for professional achievement can sometimes fail and leave the person with the impression of uselessness, trying to live with a new purpose. The search for love and fulfillment in a family life can seem daunting and like a purpose for many who see it as eluding their life. 

Many times the thing which we seek most and consider as a purpose is the thing we cannot attain. We continue to force our mind and actions into creating new alternatives for reaching the same idea over and over again, without even considering for a second time if that thing/idea is really what we need to be happy. Sometimes the happiness lies in the process, as it is described throughout the book, Flow. The psychology of optimal experience, and I believe that the process of creating and achieving your purpose is one of the most personal things one can do with their life.

"Adam si Eva" / Adam and Eve

Rebreanu's novel tells the story of a search for love and how the soul goes through stages in order to meet it's destined partner.

The story of how souls come to existence is drawn from an indian mythology. Incapsulated in a human body, the soul is destined to be purified through love, and with each life it comes near to its purpose. It takes seven lives for the soul to find its partner and to be united once more. These lives are presented in different times and places. The book contains eight short stories and in each story we see a different life of the soul. Only in the last life, when the soul has found its partner, we see a completion and the human is destined to relive his past existence.

I liked how the author portrayed the life in Sumerian times and in the times of the Roman Empire. The details are abundant, yet they lack the power to stimulate thought or to create a sense of imaginary flow. 

To me it seems a novel in which the author put a great deal of effort. At times you get carried into the atmosphere of the past times, but the cruel details in which the characters die is enough to deter those who seek a happy ending and to remind oneself that life can be easily terminated. I'm not convinced that souls reincarnate and go through stages of existence but I can understand the desire(maybe the existential need) that something which cannot be completed in this life is believed to be accomplished in another one.

The Blind Watchmaker

When I look at the world around me, I see things which simply are and things that seem to complex to exist without having a designer. Yet, what I see is not all there is and sometimes I need to open my eyes to understand more than these apparent features of things like complexity and adaptability. Dawkins tells the story of evolution using an approach that answers to my need of order, of things I can and cannot understand. By using the blind watchmaker analogy he makes a clear point in drawing attention to what we see and what we can understand at a certain time and with certain basis. For me, the basis of evolution has been laid some time ago, with the reading of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, but the understanding grows deeper every time I read something new.

In this book I’ve understood more clearly the fact that what we see is not what is perfect, but merely what it is functional from an adaptability point. Even with adaptability it must have started with something, and that something isn’t as glamorous as one might think. The grand scale of evolution is the ticking of the clock that got perfected, not the clock itself, and the ways in which this process occurs can be resembled to a blind watchmaker in action. Although we can see the watch, the watch is always changing, even if we don’t perceived as such, or we would never live in a scale of time that would enable us to perceive the changing. The variation of change can be in any direction (to give an advantage or disadvantage) but ultimately the selection favors those variation that tend to make an improvement and therefore they’re more likely to survive and be passed on to the next generation and further submitted to change.

The examples in the book are very useful and especially the way the “biomorphs” evolve can convince almost anyone that there is indeed evolution and when certain restraints from the environment are applied, the forms that take shape can be different and may even resemble some of the creatures that live in our world. The fact that the environment sets the rules and acts as a pressure to everything that is, might be seen as a law in our understanding of how life evolved in our planet. But the fact that life exists and evolves can’t be put to question in my opinion. If somebody sees in nature a perfect watch that needs no adjustments she/he has surely find one of the greatest wonders and perhaps the probability of that happening is so small that it is not even sufficient to be written on the scale of time in which we evolve from the Big Bang on. 

One of the greatest question for me is not how can we have evolved from something but why aren’t we using our intellectual power to evolve in a way in which we can adapt to our environment? Although I state my question I know the answer and just hope that time will prove me wrong.

A great book to read and think about.

River Out of Eden

I’m always interested in how things are created and how they strive to survive. The idea behind this book is to explain how life generates itself and how certain environmental forces pressure all organisms into finding ways to survive. Reading it was like taking into account that all the information that makes us who we are, is sealed in tiny part of our every cell. All humans, animals, plants evolved from this eukaryotic cell which set itself on a path to replicate itself and every successive mutation that has given it an edge over other cells has brought us here. I hope to make myself clear… or at least I try.

I understood the analogy between a river and the river of DNA which all organism posses. I found the examples in the book to be convincing, maybe because I’m well accustomed with Dawkins writings and with the Natural Selection Theory/ Darwinism. I liked it and it gave me once more a clear understanding of our motivations and aspirations in life. Because we are living creatures we must accomplish many tasks to survive and what is important for that survival is mediated, at least, by the environment in which we live, although the forces of the social environment sometimes work in pushing ourselves into wanting more and achieving more than our mere survival. Our own individual survival might seem of great importance to us, and for me certainly is, to think that we are here only in order for the genes to pass on to the next generation might seem cruel, but in light of the evidence presented seems more real that believing a fairytale heaven awaits you at the end of your life journey. (I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I think being aware and respectful towards other people is crucial for our better existence and it gives us a sense of belonging and caring that no other promise might give us- I’m thinking of the promise of heaven if we’re good.)

The more I think that I am here as a creature that can pass information received from parents, the more I find myself involved in my family’s life, my community and the world. This idea has given me the huge responsibility of being aware of myself and the messages that I transmit in a conscious way. Maybe I’m giving myself too much credit, after all, the genes might be passed on, and only if I can fundamentally make a difference maybe I can pass a meme. It seems so grandiose but in the end it’s just my brain trying to put a meaning to all the information that reaches me.

“Nunta in cer”/ (Marriage in Heaven)

Eliade’s novel continues a theme that I’ve encountered in “Intoarcerea din rai”, which is the theme of love without limits, which can only solve itself through acts of sacrifice and is ultimately an all or nothing game. A young writer that is cynical and full of himself to the point that his attitude is one in which he firmly believes he can decipher any woman or man within seconds or minutes, finds himself in love with a woman (Ileana), but unable to truly commit and live his love earthly, as opposed to what he thinks is the ultimate love, one that can be lived/felt only in an ethereal place (heavens).

This idea stops him and blinds him, as he cannot understand the woman he loves, nor how she feels about their love. He thinks that writer can/must only create art during times in which something is missing from their lives, in a sense that the urgency to create some imaginary world compensates for whichever lacks in one’s live. It is a very selfish point of view, from my opinion. As the action continues he separates himself from his love, to the point that he asks her to only love him, that their love may be sterile, without a child. The obvious happens, and after an abortion of which the main character is unaware of, he finds himself left, abandoned, as the girl could not live in his fantasy of how his perfect love should look like.

To add a mystery to the story, the author introduces another friend to whom the young writer confides his lost love. This elder man confides as well of a love he felt 8-9 years in the past and the story this love, which he thinks represents the love of his life. After finding out that the heroine has a similar name (Lena), the reader is left with a feeling that the book is more about a woman than two men telling their regrets of a one true love that escaped without them noticing it. We find out that after the First World War a teenage girl is separated from her aunt while traveling in a train and a young man helps her to the nearest train stop. This teenage girl is then seen as a young woman that falls in love with the man that helped her, years after. Their love ignites during a trip through Europe, during which they get married and start a life of their own. Due to their age difference their ideas of love are different: she wishes to live their love by themselves, he starts wishing for a baby, and because neither explains to the other their idea of love, they argue and ultimately they divorce, and decide not to see each other again.
The story is about love, and a woman through different times in her life, and with different men. It made me think about the damage an unspoken idea of love might due to a pair of lovers. Just imagine two lovers which are in love, but feel as if their love should be in some way, a way which is incongruent to the how the other feels. It indeed can destroy a relationship if there is no communication, or so I think anyway.

An interesting novel to read.

The Steve Jobs way: iLeadership for a new generation

For a book which claims to give an insight into the way in which Jobs leads his company I find it very brief and short of introductory. Granted, I don't have a serious knowledge in management, mainly just heard of it and read some books on the management of creative ideas and people, but it seems rather to skim the surface and to portray some autobiographical memories as source to increment and to provide an argument to ideas. It did indeed brought me a new perspective into the history of Apple and the way in which Jobs managed it alongside with Next and Pixar.

At times I found the book to be inspiring, in that it tells one to believe in an idea that motivates oneself and to be honest with ourself about the products of our work. Nonetheless it gave me an impression that Jobs is merely an exception, that his way might work in some fields and in others he might have been just another great guy which is tormented by the idea of greatness. The good thing for him is that he picked his field of work right and stand by his choices and was his own prophet and agent of his prophecies.

Do I feel like I've enriched myself be reading this? Surely. Any book provides a way to perceive the world differently and this one put great emphasis on being dedicated to your ideas, knowing when you need to take the idea from the beginning or when you just need to discard it.