Man's Search for Meaning

In the Afterword of Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning: "Frankl was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. He wrote the response on a paper and asked his students to guess what he had written. After some moments of quiet reflection, a student surprised Frankl by saying, "The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs."
"That was it, exactly," Frankl said. "Those are the very words I had written."

Frankl wrote his most broadly-read work, the Man's Search for Meaning in nine days. It is beautifully and clearly written. He considers our drive for a meaningful life a basic tennet of our human existence. Two of my favorite quotes from his book (there are many!) are the following. It comes embedded in his discussion of mental health NOT as homeostasis, a state of equilibrium but rather a tension that propels the individual forward. This is an interesting food for thought. We often consider our movements aimed towards equilibrium, but if we understand the deep reaching truth in the idea that the meaning of life is to strive towards meaning, the state of homeostasis comes to a different light.
Here are the quotes:
"Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.”
"So if therapists wish to foster their patients’ mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s life.”

Interestingly enough, my main area of interest in psychotherapy, the Focusing-oriented model pays a great amount of attention to "forward movement". When we focus inward and find the bodily felt sensation that expresses an implicit aspect of our feelings or reactions, we end up with a bodily felt release, a life forwarding movement. While in Focusing we pay attention to the underlying implicitly felt experience, our very own inner experience, we end up with something that Frankl devoted his life to: attributing primacy to the essential role of meaning, the ultimate role meaning plays in human life.