Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, and the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it – or fail to fill it – that give significance to our existence. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfil, or fulfil half-heartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited ‘for all eternity’. Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently ‘cancelled out’ by becoming the past. In truth it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The ‘being’, the reality that we have preserved in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.