It’s Sunday, Halloween 2021, one day after the soft launch of my latest book, Jumpback. I’m still prepping the audiobook and print editions. Unbelievably, this is the first novel I’m trying to properly promote right out of the gate, through advertising, email list signups, etc. So much stuff in this area to learn. The next book launch should go smoother.
In the midst of this, I finished listening to Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Yes, the gender-excluding title bugs me, too, but this was published in 1946, so its author was caught by the time he lived in as we all are.
Still a fascinating book, not only from Frankl’s recounting of his experience as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps, but also from his description of his pioneering (at the time) logotherapy, which essentially helps people find the meaning in their work, their suffering, their families, their lives. His maxim was, roughly: Picture yourself having already lived what you are going to do now, having made all the mistakes you are going to make now, and think about how you might do it in a way more aligned with your best purpose in life.
The encouragement to think about what it is you want to do with your life is nothing new to me, but like all such important questions, my experience and reaction to it is different each decade or so that I consider it. This time around, it helped me clarify what I want to do with my writing, acting, filmmaking, and any other thing I put out into the world, including myself, as a speaker, teacher, friend, colleague, citizen.
To put this in context, back in 1999 (I think it was) I applied to Kris Rusch and Dean Smith’s first Oregon Coast Professional Writer’s Masterclass, and in my admission submission, stated my purpose for my writing as: To make the world weep with joy and understanding. In other words, I wanted to give people the kind of profound experience I had gotten from books growing up.
Since then, I’ve realized the “weeping” I referred to was meant to capture the intensity of how a well-told story affected me. It went past my intellectual appreciation to touch the emotional core of my being and shaped my reactions to each theme, character, and situation in my own life that resembled one in the story. I’ve also come to see that weeping with “joy and understanding ,“ specifically, captures one of the most meaningful or transformative types of emotional experience that humans can have. It’s something my acting teacher, a wise and very human, striving man named Matthew Harrison described as joy-pain, the intense state of feeling both the pain and the joy of something at the same time. The yin-yang. The way so many value-laden things in life are inextricably wedded to their opposites.
This joy-pain is present in a lot of the best moments of the best books and movies. It’s Harry Potter experiencing the joy of seeing his parents in the Mirror of Erised even as it brings home how he’s never known them. It’s Red’s final meeting up with Andy at the end of The Shawshank Redemption, whether you take it as a literal final place of escape and peace for these two friends or some symbolic representation of Heaven after Red has died/committed suicide, because in either case there is both joy and an acknowledgement that all the rest of Red and Andy’s former friends and loves and most of the days of their lives are gone.
Joy-pain.
It’s all of the Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
The value of all this is a richer appreciation of life and a better ability to view ourselves and other people with compassion. Art can help people grow into this place. So can people who share themselves with others in positive ways, showing us how to enjoy life, even with all the pain that’s inextricably a part of it.
I want my writing, ultimately, to help people get there. I want to be a person who can live the joy and compassion that helps people get there. So…same goal as 22 years ago, but the image I see through the glass on this All Hallows’ Eve is so much brighter.
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