My favourite paragraph was written by Viktor Frankl in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. For context, Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who spent three years imprisoned in four different concentration camps during the Second World War. Here are the words he used to describe how he felt after being liberated:

One day, a few days after the liberation, I walked through the country past flowering meadows, for miles and miles, toward the market town near the camp. Larks rose to the sky and I could hear their joyous song. There was no one to be seen for miles around; there was nothing but the wide earth and sky and the larks’ jubilation and the freedom of space. I stopped, looked around, and up to the sky—and then I went down on my knees. At that moment there was very little I knew of myself or of the world—I had but one sentence in mind—always the same: “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.”

Ever since I read that paragraph a few years ago, I have thought about it often. The moment Viktor describes is so beautiful that at first I thought it marked the end of all his suffering, but in the next few pages he makes it clear that that moment was really the beginning of a long and difficult journey towards recovery. He had lost his parents, brother and wife in the same camps where he had been imprisoned, and now he had to rebuild his body and his life.

Seeing the contrast between what I thought that moment meant for Viktor and what it really meant for him helped me understand that sadness is something that can stay with you for a long time, even after what made you suffer has ended, and that it’s normal for it to do that. That was a liberating realization for me, because once I knew that, I stopped spending time thinking about when my sadness would go away, and instead I started living.

Viktor’s words also helped me appreciate what a miracle the “freedom of space” is. I can’t count the number of times when I have been running or climbing and I have thought to myself: thank you Lord for the freedom of space.

Running