He Who Has a Why to Live Can Bear Almost Any How
When you think hardship interferes with art
This morning YouTube fed me a Jillian Michael video on motivation and I was struck by her Friedrich Nietzsche quote: "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”. Jillian was referring to weight loss.
The quote felt like watching sparklers on the beach at night. It was a gentle but electric. It was a poetic summary, if you will, of the last five years.
Existential angst brutally dominated my life and my mind off and on since my mother died and its overbearing nature exhausted me to depletion. After three back to back deaths, a few broken friendships and a bat invasion in my home (a story for another time), I grew tired of meditating my way to joy. I lost all connection with my spiritual connection - zero, zip, nada.
During this dark, “lost in the forest” period or as some spiritualists would call it, my “dark night of the soul”, of course, I turned to art for comfort. A used camera here, another song recording there, and all along, tiny incremental additions to my book I’ve been working on for way too long. These were baby deposits into an investment buried deep in the dark soil. I can’t see the deposits nor the seeds, but I began seeing the sprouts.
When you’re walking in darkness, how do you know that it’s almost over?
You start to see little rays of light in the distance, but you won’t see anything if you sit down in the dark and refuse to keep walking. Yet you cannot stand up and start walking again without a reason. "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”. Yet, how do you conjure up the “why”?
I think the “why” for me was held in the intentional conversations that kept going on internally, carefully and gingerly. Not the conversations that had a “charge” to them - the ones that were not peaceful. It was the peaceful, gentle ones or the ones that were …assured. Soon, I became my own child, comforting myself at every turn and encouraging curiosity.
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”. What if the why is just you?
I kept hearing, “Do this for you. If you care about yourself and love yourself deeply, there is hope that this can be done.” While in darkness, making those little deposits blindly along the way eventually sprout something: joy, hope or at least, peace.
In 2018, my dark night of the soul began. If you would have asked me at the time if I was being creatively productive, I would have responded with angst, “no, and it’s killing me.” Yet during this time, I managed to produce a first draft of a book, complete five years of vocal training, release my first ever recorded EP, shoot over 20,000 images for my band, get career bump, and make the final payment on my house.
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”. The why is in you.
All photos made by me: © www.juliettemansour.com