March 22, 2016

Here we are in London, just eight days into our journey and I am homesick. I feel eager to begin something truly meaningful. Honestly this isn't the first time I've felt this way since leaving. I even felt a little like this before we left. I long for a greater understanding of my purpose, but I am failing to see what that might be. Sam and I had a number of tense conversations as we hashed out the fact that we had completely different expectations amongst which she told me that the solution to my angst is obvious to her; she'd told me that before. Others have uttered the very same sentiment, but where Sam stopped short at telling me what to do others have opined and disappointed. It's funny that the person who would probably have the most accurate answer to my query is the one who refuses to answer. She knows me more intimately than I would've imagined myself capable of allowing.

(she be sneaky like that) Because she knows me, well enough to satisfy my consternation; she also knows that whether she has the answer or not, I can't be told what to do. Is that a character flaw? I don't believe it to be. I'm proud of my insistence on questioning what is, what is assumed, and what is expected. But today and many days as of late, it has caused me to question my existence. I'm learning that such a question left unanswered for to long festers, oozes, and decays like an infection at the soul.

When I told Sam that I had finished Frankl's book and was dissatisfied with the conclusion she seemed a little surprised. It wasn't that my frustration over not having figured out an answer surprised her, and it certainly wasn't that Frankl hadn't answered the question; that was a forgone conclusion to her. She was surprised that I ever had any expectation of a concrete, "here's YOUR path" kind of answer. I must be desperate... I'm longing for an easy way out.

I've begun reading a book despite not understanding what the point for me is. It's a book directed at people who are dating, engaged or single and hoping to be in a wonderful God-fearing marriage. I don't remember how it came up on my kindle but I read the blurb about it, and it resonated with something in me toward my search for a meaning so I read more. Now despite being most wonderfully in a marriage to an incredible woman who shares my faith and pushes me to reach the potential that she recognizes beyond the point which I am satisfied or content, I am reading

a book about evaluating the why you got married and finding a good soul mate. Perhaps there is an obvious reason I might've been drawn to this, but I seem to yet be blind to it. I think I must be prone to missing the forest for the trees. I read the alchemist and was terrible bored, I believe because I missed it. When I was in college, I was a part of a facilitation team, and during training we were doing a blindfolded activity. I loved being blindfolded, forced to discern my surrounding by acutley tuning other senses and really FEELING. It was a maze and we had to find our way out, but if at any point we were done we just put up our hand and someone came and took us out. I really like being blindfolded and given a task to complete. Many people dropped out, and I began to lead the only

contingent of other participants still in the maze. Then the facilitator stopped the exercise. We took off our blindfolds and saw that there hadn't been another way out. In the discussion about the activity afterward one of my best friends, now also my brother-in-law, pointed out that at one point I had explained to the people I was leading that we had gone all the way around the perimeter and that I had a good mental picture of that, but I want to build the center of the maze in my head as well. Talk about the blind leading the blind. I knew that the perimeter was closed, but couldn't see that that meant there wasn't a way out. Frankl talked about his disagreements with some of his contemporaries. Some fellow psychologists believed that man simply had to endure the meaninglessness of life and go on in search of pleasure. Frankl wrote that instead it is our inability to grasp the meaningfulness of all

aspects of life which we must endure. So on I read into a book that to me makes no sense on my journey, taking some small bit of hope that there is a useful meaning to it. And on I wander hoping and praying that with each revolution I come a bit closer to at least a partial revelation, but today I am probably missing the forest for the trees.