This article could just as easily be titled, “Honor Thy Father and Mother,” – you’ll see why as you read on.

As I write this, I am preparing to embark on a brief road trip with my Dad tomorrow.  I’m sure it will be a bittersweet adventure as we honor my Mom’s passing earlier this year, and travel to the place where they honeymooned almost 45 years ago.  We will drive and chat, eat well and maybe drink a few beers together, and I am sure we will cry.  I’m looking forward to it – looking forward to time with my Dad that we haven’t had in quite a while.  But I also dread it – I dread the emotional toll it will take and the hurt that will rise up that I’ve worked so hard to bury.

But it’s the right thing to do.  It’s the meaningful thing to do.  I really “should” be working those days – I’ve got plenty of projects going on, and lots of irons in the fire I should be addressing.  I could come up with plenty of excuses, but that would be too easy and too expedient.  Life isn’t about doing what is expedient – it’s about doing what is meaningful.

As I was thinking about the upcoming trip, and the meaning potential behind it – yes, that truly is how I think sometimes – I was reminded of one of my favorite stories from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning – the story of why he didn’t flee Vienna during the Nazi occupation, and how that cost him three years in the concentration camps.  It’s a beautifully tragic story – but one that raises the question:

What “signs” do you need to see in order to convince yourself to pursue more meaningful opportunities in life?

The reader may ask me why I did not try to escape what was in store for me after Hitler had occupied Austria. Let me answer by recalling the following story.

Shortly before the United States entered World War II, I received an invitation to come to the American Consulate in Vienna to pick up my immigration visa. My old parents were overjoyed because they expected that I would soon be allowed to leave Austria. I suddenly hesitated, however. The question beset me: could I really afford to leave my parents alone to face their fate, to be sent, sooner or later, to a concentration camp, or even to a so-called extermination camp? Where did my responsibility lie? Should I foster my brain child, logotherapy, by emigrating to fertile soil where I could write my books? Or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child, the child of my parents who had to do whatever he could to protect them? I pondered the problem this way and that but could not arrive at a solution; this was the type of dilemma that made one wish for “a hint from Heaven,” as the phrase goes. It was then that I noticed a piece of marble lying on a table at home. When I asked my father about it, he explained that he had found it on the site where the National Socialists had burned down the largest Viennese synagogue. He had taken the piece home because it was a part of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed. One gilded Hebrew letter was engraved on the piece; my father explained that this letter stood for one of the Commandments. Eagerly I asked, “Which one is it?” He answered, “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land.” At that moment I decided to stay with my father and my mother upon the land, and to let the American visa lapse.