“…. Living a life of silent screaming desperation”
My Friend,
After a day of helping talented photographer Jim Morris in his studio in Downtown Downey, California, something he said which caught my ear, and my heart. He was speaking of his past, of the silent scream of desperation he had once felt choking him and stealing his life from his very hands.
Being a writer, perhaps I’ve taken some poetic license with his words – but I trust the sentiment is there. How often have we, myself included, pushed forward with our lives out of silent screaming desperation without knowing any way out of our own boxes. When Kraft Foods steals the scoop on National Bureau of Economic Research in identifying America’s recession – what choice do we honestly have? Abraham Maslow, in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, talks about the fact that the drive to personal growth can only be met after the basic food, water, shelter, sleep needs are met.. but how? When doing the things it takes to meet those ends feels like a living death?
It comes down to this: For What Purpose? And in the middle of what may be winter — is that worth it to you? And if that purpose isn’t bright enough, ask yourself again: that purpose… for what even higher purpose? Thereby painting this purpose so bright that in all the darkness, its very existence rises up and brings you light once more.
Asking ourselves today, like Viktor Frankl did in his death-camp experience, as he realized: “The truth–that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
“He who has a why for life can put with any how.”
Frederick Nietzsche
I know, I know… demmed hippy.
What’s in your purpose?
Kaye
