I had the sense of imploding, a silent inward collapsing without great fanfare, as if I was folding into myself. Perhaps it was plain tiredness from trying to make or force a situation with many dead ends to work. Perhaps it was the onset of some kind of depression, something very unfamiliar to me.

Blame it on the book. It was one year after Eva gave me the book of Viktor Frankl and Pinchas Lapide about their conversations on the search for meaning [see previous blogs]. Re-reading the book now after more than a decade, many of the parts I underlined in black ink centred on having a purpose in life and the actualisation of self.  A person only has the ability to actualise him/ herself to the degree in which he / she does not aim at their own actualisation, happiness or desires, but finds it by way of something else. You cannot aim at self-actualisation and fulfilling human potential. Meaning cannot be given. It can only be found by living life, by way of daily, often mundane encounters with people, things and experiences in concrete situations. Frankl quotes Abraham Maslow – “My experience agrees with Frankl’s that people who seek self-actualisation directly, dichotomized away from a mission in life, don’t in fact, achieve it”. You must have a reason, a ground to actualise yourself, to fulfil your potential, albeit a person or a thing.

I went to see a psychologist in a beautiful wooden house overlooking an apple orchard (the sheer beauty of it helped as well). We had a few conversations, and at some stage we started working with images and metaphors …… a horse trapped in a stable, his hoofs rotting in the mud, tired from trying to scale the high wooden fence of the stable without success. That’s where I encountered the force of a metaphor and the power of imagination. This is integral to the narrative process of re-authoring alternative outcomes to problem-saturated stories, and identifying a purpose in life and imagining the outcome in Frankl’s logotherapy.

At the end the only way out of that dark and muddy stable, was for the horse to break through the thick wooden fence – to go through it even if it caused injury. I had to leave a country, friends and an intimate relationship that was a safe haven for nine years. But the horse was free…