Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.46

Take me and cast me where you wish; for there I shall keep my divine part tranquil, that is, content, if it can feel and act conformably to its proper constitution.

Is this change of place sufficient reason why my soul should be unhappy and worse than it was, depressed, expanded, shrinking, frightened? And what will you find which is sufficient reason for this?

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8 (tr Long)

During what I call my Wilderness Years, where I allowed myself to be overwhelmed by loneliness and despair, I made a number of frantic efforts to keep myself afloat. At one point, I dropped all my academic pretensions, and sought out work that might better serve my soul.

I stumbled across a chance to work in Catholic social services, and I jumped at it. Asked which particular ministries interested me, I immediately chose AIDS patients and prisoners. At that time, those who suffered from AIDS were largely considered pariahs, just as those doing jail time still are to this day.

I somehow figured, quite selfishly perhaps, that if I could work around that sort of suffering, where others will barely consider you to be human, it might help me to come to terms with my own suffering.

What I did not expect was the degree to which the experience would affect me, and how it continued changing me for years afterwards. I was forcefully pulled out of all my first-world problems, and shown the bare bones of how other people face real pain.

I slowly observed that people weren’t made or broken by suffering, but rather that they made or broke themselves through suffering. It wasn’t what happened to them, but what they chose to do with what happened to them.

I hardly think I ever helped anyone else, because I was really just a gofer, but many of those people helped me. It was in hospitals and prisons that I saw both some of the best and the worst in people; it was the judgment about circumstances that made the difference.

The words of Viktor Frankl, which had only been a profound abstraction before, were now strikingly real:

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.

It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal.

Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not.

Wherever you may put me, and under whatever conditions I must live, am I not still capable of living with dignity and character? Yes, the outside may be chipped away, but the inside can still flourish; in fact it can flourish all the more, because greater hardship can actually offer an opportunity for greater virtue.

If I can rightly understand what it is that gives my life meaning and value, the excellence of my own attitude, I can recognize that I do not need to consider any state of affairs to be too much to handle. The weight of circumstances and the power of pain only have as much power as I permit them to have.

Do you choose to treat me like an animal? You have made that choice. Now whether I choose to also become like an animal, or thrive as a human being, is entirely my own choice.

Written in 4/2008