Hello from here to there,
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of speaking at Sundance, sitting in a director’s chair beside two women, producer and dear friend of ours Kate Cohen, and our beloved Mary, for the Harbor Film Forum. We were invited to talk about Viktor Frankl’s book called a Man’s Search for Meaning and the film of his life that Kate and Tony are actually partnering on to bring his story to the screen together.
If you ask Tony what book has impacted him most, or what one book he believes everyone should read, his answer is always the same:
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, he’s been recommending it for years.
It’s how the three of us gals all first came to read it.
I’m certainly no scholar, but there are some insights and understandings we encounter that shift how we perceive life. In that way, Man’s Search for Meaning is a sacred text.
If you don’t know Viktor Frankl, he was a psychiatrist in Vienna who was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. His mother, father, brother, and his beloved pregnant wife were all killed in the Holocaust.
Viktor survived, but returned home having lost everyone he ever loved.
From that indescribable experience came Man's Search for Meaning, a book he wrote about our innate human capacity to find life’s beauty and meaning even in the midst of unimaginable pain and suffering.
Few of could ever comprehend the atrocities Viktor Frankl endured.
Yet life eventually brings each of us to our knees, loss, death, diagnosis, divorce whatever rites of passage life chooses for us.
Viktor Frankl reminds us that we can’t control life’s circumstances, and yet there is something within us that cannot be taken nor marred by anything we go through.
We are more than our pain. More than our stories. More than our conditioning or states of mind.
Even in the midst terror, we have the capacity to pause, to perceive the miracle. And to choose how we meet what is here.
That is what has lingered with me from this book after all these years.
In our conversation, we found ourselves talking less about making a movie and more about being human. It’s suffering, meaning, beauty, and the freedom we each have in how we choose to respond to life.
👉 Come sit with Kate, Mary and me at Harbor Film Forum.
WATCH A CONVERSATION CLIP FROM SUNDANCE
THIS WEEK’S REFLECTION
This week, I invite you to take a sacred pause and ask:
What in my life have I been afraid to turn toward?
What is beautiful, even here?
What might life be asking of me in this moment?
With love,
Sage 🪷
P.S. I'd love to hear what arises for you from this. Your responses each week remind me where we all meet in this human experience. Thank you for your vulnerability and courage, weavers of goodness in your lives and in this community. [We pull one shining star each week for the Living the Way section…]
Mary thank you for reminding us of the power of nature to realign us, reset us, remind us of a greater whole. Thanks for sharing a piece of your world with us, Sage. Xo
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