“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how“.
– Nietzsche
Rob came up with this one this week….so he is doing a guest post! Love this man!!!:
“I have to admit I got this off of one of those sites (actually called brainyquotes.com!!).
So what can we get from Nietzsche the man who declared God is Dead!?! Well actually our quote of the week is really revealing of his great faith and desire for eternal meaning. Indeed it is most ironic that only someone of great faith and belief in a higher power could make such a statement about God.
It is interesting to see how as we explore our own issues from family to relationships to faith, we circle back to so many of the fundamentals. I don’t how many times we all see that on one’s death bed the most important “why” to living comes out. Moreover, how many times do we see people dragging themselves around depressed about money or gossip or something even more serious and all but giving up on life? This is not to say that any of those things are easy to endure! On the contrary they can really suck. They can really hurt. They can in fact leave you hungry and sick and tired! So when I read Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” proclamation and more recently our quote of the week, it struck me how he was not writing people and the world off, but rather lamenting the loss of something wonderful, a widely accepted and lived moral code, a “why” that leads to enduring the “how” and makes us carry on, pick ourselves up and believe and hope for things to get better.
It is enduring the “how” that so challenges us day in day out and demands that we teach our kids and each other the “why”. How do you get through things from the small disappointment about a bad mark in school, to a failed business deal to a disappointing result with a patient/client to the really big ones like the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, or the loss of security? I think it only gets a little easier as we mature and are able to define the “why”. I know for me the why is my wonderful marriage, the smile on our kids’ faces, the belief that there is a higher meaning in life that connects the here and now with the future and beyond (even after death). Being able to stitch these things together under the framework of this last point, that is life is not an open and shut case of “use it and lose it”, is what we all need to strive to do. It’s easier as we get older and wiser but it is so worth teaching to our children as soon as we can. And reinforce it”.
