The Why and the How

After finishing yet another book, E.L. Doctorow's work of historical fiction, Homer & Langley, I picked a book off the stack on my nightstand that I'd begun reading a while back, but that I hadn't been in the right place to pursue to its end.

Bread Upon the Waters is written by Peter Reinhart, the man who wrote the award winning The Bread Baker's Apprentice, the inspiration and urtext on my learning journey of baking bread.  This earlier book functions as a memoir with recipes, a recounting of the author's path from hippie commune-living college student to religious brother to his current iteration as professor of bread baking at Johnson and Wales University.

I can't even say why I wasn't prepared to read the book before now.  (I purchased it over two years ago).  But the time finally seemed apropos for something like a bildungsroman as I transition out of the classroom and into the real world.

More than evolution into manhood or learning to make bread, Reinhart's Bread Upon the Waters is an extended metaphor of how the process behind making world-class bread mirrors our personal journeys into life and faith.

As I understand it, we begin as rough, unfinished materials.  We're stirred into being.  We're given time to mature and develop.  We may well get punched around and need more time to grow.  If we're lucky, we're formed by experienced, caring hands.    We're tested by fire.  And, ultimately, we're given to the world to share of ourselves.

While reading last night, nearing the end of my chapter, I read a quote from Holocaust survivor and Austrian neurologist Viktor Frankl.  Reinhart writes:

His (Frankl's) premise was that a person's search for meaning in life is a primary force, and frustration in this search is often the cause of our anxieties.  The solution he proposed was, of course, to reconnect a person with a sense of meaning.  This may not clear our lives of problems or obstacles but it enables us to bear the inevitable suffering of life with dignity and purpose.  Frankl adopted the existential truism, "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how."  (Emphasis added)

That statement stuck with me and, frankly, kept me awake for a while.

I think it's fair that any single one of us asks the questions:  Why do I live?   Who or what do I live for?

It's also fair to say that, for the first question anyway, I don't have a solid answer at the moment.  I live for the prospect of a real job.  I live for the idea of independence.  I live for the eventuality of being able to pay off my student loans, to be able to go on vacations like my friends do, and to not have to worry so much about money.

But are those enough?  Beyond those things, I'm at a bit of a loss.  Should I have some deeper goal, some philanthropic/idealistic notion of what my job will be able to help me do or become?

This book has already accomplished one thing:  it's made me reconsider prayer.  I've been very troubled in my faith as of late.  That was born out of hypocrisies I see in the Catholic Church, friends who have similarly fallen away from religion, and, being completely honest, my own doubts.  I have, once more, considered the positive reassurances of invoking divine intervention.  Even if it falls on deaf ears, it somehow calms me.  That alone makes the time well-spent.

While I've always stood by the idea that when a door closes a window - somewhere - opens, I guess I've been waiting for that window to appear for far too long without actually looking for it.  No one ever tells you that... that you need to look for the light sometimes rather than just wait for it to find you.  It's my fault I stayed at YSU for so long.  I accepted the darkness and never sought out light and a life outside of my dissatisfaction with what mine had become.

If Frankl was able to survive three years in concentration camps by finding meaning in what his life had been reduced to, I think I can (at the very least) work to identify the meaning behind my existence in far less perilous circumstances.  Frankl found meaning in work, in love, and in courage.

I'm working on work.  Love?  Well, I have that.  I just need to appreciate it more.  And, as the Cowardly Lion once did, I need to believe in my own courage.   It took courage to walk away from my job.  It took courage to tell my mother about Matt.  I have it... I just need to remember it's there once in a while.

The journey continues...

- Bill