Tiny Buddha, Simple Wisdom for Life's Hard Questions. Lori Deschene

love was literally magic. I imagined it as a luminescence, something that could embrace two people in some type of protective, light-drenched cocoon. At five years old, this made perfect sense to me—that when two people love each other, their hearts synchronize and transform together into something bigger and infinitely more powerful than anything else that has ever or could ever exist.

      I believed fully in that magic and, unlike my supposedly undying devotion to the ideas of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, that ideal never fully faded as I grew older. Even after I learned that some adults divorce and get nasty with each other, or stay married and berate each other, and long after I understood that some people create new people without even liking each other, I still believed transformative, all-encompassing love was the closest thing to real magic that we can ever know in this lifetime. I thought love would one day crack open my world, shake out everything that hurt, and heal it all under the light of unconditional acceptance and affection.

      I didn't realize it back then, but I was fantasizing about an escape from the pain of being me—and the nearest exit I could imagine was someone, anyone, else. But a lot of the people I clung to were anything but loving toward me. It's easy to confuse attachment with love, particularly when we consider that we come into this world and leave it alone—that we are part of the whole but still apart. So, is it possible to ascertain the love that is the meaning of life? Can an obscure, moving, and eventually disintegrating target really be the point of it all?

      In his book Man's Search for Meaning, Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl explored his three years at Dachau, Auschwitz, and other concentration camps. Surrounded by death and depravity, with every reason to grow bitter, resentful, and resigned, Frankl decided that people can endure anything if they have a compelling reason to do so. One of his driving motivations was to see his imprisoned pregnant wife again. He'd think about her smile, her presence, and the reunion they'd have when they could finally be together again. His love for her helped him endure dehumanization, disillusionment, and immense suffering. Frankl lived in a constant state of torturous uncertainty—about when his number might be called and about whether his wife's already had been—but his longing gave him a purpose—to push through for her, and their life together.

      Based on this understanding, you might assume that he lost the will to live when he finally walked out a free man and learned his wife and most of the rest of his family had been killed. If his love for them kept him going, their being gone should have meant he stopped. Instead, he knew the power of love to continually provide meaning, even after a loved one has passed.

      Frankl recounts a conversation he had with another man who lost his wife. Having cherished her as the most important thing in his world, the widower felt crippled and severely depressed in her absence. Frankl asked what might have happened if he had died first, leaving her to mourn his loss. When the widower realized the turn of events saved her the agony of grieving over him, he appeared to adopt a whole new perspective on the experience of living without her— perhaps because it had some meaning. His suffering prevented hers. He could stay strong and purposeful, even without her, by focusing more on what love expected from him than on what he expected from love.

      Most of us don't need to hold on to love to push us through agonizingly tragic circumstances. A great deal of what we consider unbearable is really just highly unpleasant, at worst. But just because we don't need the full power of love doesn't mean we can't benefit from it: love isn't just something we want to secure for ourselves— it's something that can help pull us outside of ourselves. I know that I've felt my lowest and emptiest often when I was drowning in my own self-involvement—all the things I thought I needed and my immense frustration over how unlikely it seemed that I would ever get them.

      Most of them weren't even slightly important in the grand scheme of things. And bemoaning how I didn't have them just distracted me from appreciating all the things I did have—those little things Frankl dreamed about when he was pushing toward his uncertain future: meaningful relationships, the freedom to enjoy them, and the power to make a positive difference in other people's lives. No matter the event, it can become meaningful if it somehow helps other people. All we need is love, but not as something we wait to receive—as something we repeatedly make and share.

      FIND MEANING THROUGH SHARED LOVE.

      If you feel like you aren't finding the love that you seek:

      Identify who you can help because of what you've experienced. Are you more insightful because of your struggles, enabling you to be more sensitive to other people? Can you write a blog post or an article to help people at large? We are all in this together, and everything that happens to one person ripples to affect others. If whatever happened hasn't affected you in a positive way, how can you filter that through your love so that it can be a positive for other people?

      Focus on what other people mean to you and what you want to mean to them. If this were your last day on Earth, what would you tell the people you love about what they've meant to you? Now, actually tell them today. What difference would you want them to feel you've made in their lives? Would you want them to feel you helped encourage them to go after their dreams? Or motivated them to be good to themselves? Or helped them discover their purpose? What can you do today to create that impact in their lives?