Provisional Existence Viktor Frankl was a well known psychiatrist and later developed a field in "logotherapy". He also endured and survived 3 years as a prisoner of Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz.

One of Frankl's discoveries within the concentration camps is what he calls a "provisional existence". It's where a person live an existence without a clear future and without an obvious goal.

From one of my favorite books of all time, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. This passage often lift my spirits in good times and bad. A constant reminder to keep an optimistic attitude and enjoy the limitless opportunities given to me in life.

"Such people forget that often it is just such an exceptionally difficult external situation which gives man the opportunity to grow spiritually beyond himself. Instead of taking camp's difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised its as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless...

...we could say that most men in a concentration camp believed that the real opportunities of life had passed. Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners." - Viktor Frankl, on one's attitude, the last of the human freedoms

Labels: Books, Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl

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