Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Funny How Things Work...


I wanted to call you today. I had some down time that I only get on Wednesdays and I was feeling like I hadn't talked to you for a while. I wanted to ask you how long you can leave thawed chicken breast in the fridge before you cook it. I wanted to tell you what's new with my work and school, and that my neck hurts because I still have that crappy pillow. 

When you have your first broken heart and feel so sad, thinking like you've lost something precious, feeling worthless, like the world can't continue, you think you know what longing is. It is horrible longing for that boy or girl to like you, to realize they're an idiot, to come back to you. That is nothing compared to the longing of grief. Longing for something that you know is unattainable, longing from the pit of your stomach, the core of your being.

Tonight I came across a poem after searching "longing and grief". The poem, "But Perhaps God Needs Longing" by Nelly Sachs was written  about "the longing for a lover and of the disappointment of lost love. After her experiences during the Holocaust, most of Sachs’s poems dealt with the destruction of European Jewry. She used her poems to express the deep sense of loss and grief that she felt and as a form of catharsis for the many emotions that she had experienced during the war years" (Endnotes.com). I felt like I really could relate to this because I have been using writing as an outlet too. It really came full circle because she was a survivor of the Holocaust which made me think of Logotherapy created by a Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl. The basis of his theory was developed during his time in a concentration camp and he posits that:
  • Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.
  • Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
  • We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with a situation of unchangeable suffering.(Wikipedia) 
While I know this grief would not be categorized as unchangeable suffering compared to the Holocaust, I do try to keep in mind the power of  attitude like Frankl's theory suggests. But it's hard.

I apologize because this post was very scattered and in no way, shape, or form cited correctly.

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