If there is a purpose in life, there’s one in suffering too

As children we repeated the lessons we learnt from our religious books. One of the questions then was: Why did god make you? The answer often was: God made me to know him, to love him and to be happy with him now in this life and forever after.

Perhaps it may not be easy to accept this answer when we see the evil around us and the sufferings we have to endure. This could also be a reason why there is a rise in the suicide rate around the world.

When people find the going tough they find no purpose in living. On the other hand, there are many people who know how to deal with suffering. For they believe in the maxim — when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. For them life and its problems are a challenge.

Viktor Frankl, a professor of neurology and psychiatry, in Man’s Search for Meaning speaks of his own experience. He was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp for three years. In spite of all the inhuman torture, and having lost his dear ones, he found a meaning in life. He quotes Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words — “He who has a ‘why’ to life can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

To live, is to suffer; to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying too. But no one can tell another what this purpose is. Each one must find out for himself/herself this purpose and accept the responsibility that the answer prescribes.

In intense suffering people can lose their mind. All the dreams they have may fade away. What remains is the last of human freedoms — the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.