Man's Search For Meaning

Yesterday was my dad's 58th birthday and we had some of the extended Brennan family over for dinner. Because of this I had to miss my second book club meeting. One of the books was, "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl. I'll admit that I in NO way finished the book and the book club is more about a group of people coming together to eat and drink rather than to actually talk about a book, but anyway, in it Frankl talks about being a Holocaust survivor. Essentially, Frankl concludes that the meaning of life is found in every moment of living, that life never ceases to have meaning.

I thought of this when I was talking to my cousin Meghan last night who spent her Fall semester of college studying abroad in Florence. With a kind heart, she warned me not to expect to go to Italy and have some sort of epiphany, that I shouldn't have such high expectations for the 3 months that I am there and expect to come back a changed woman. I related this to a few years back when I lost a significant amount of weight. I had imagined that once I got to a low enough weight that I would transform into this new, better person, only to come to find that I was the very same Callie, thinner or heavier. So when Meg said that to me last night I thought of how if all of life is meaningful, Italy will be just another added meaningful experience in life. I believe that it's all about your state of mind. Lately I've been a strong advocate of "Mind over Matter."

A quote from the book:
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

It's crazy to think of all of the choices we make in one day. Example of choices I've made in the last 2 days: wearing one Valentine's day sock with one Christmas sock, going to Starbucks early on free pastry day, going a full week without drinking because I started to feel like an alcoholic, baking a homemade yellow cake for Dad's birthday, striking up embarrassing conversations with people in Whole Foods, etc. What kinds of choices do YOU make on a daily basis?

Fun fact I learned last night on the travel channel: The most celebrated McDonald's is located in Rome. Who knew!?