Talking Rockies

Trekking for Meaning

In “Man’s Search for Meaning,” writer and “Logotherapist” Viktor Frankl talks of his experience in the brutal Nazi prison camps, and how he was able to transcend the daily squalor, banality and brutality there. One day, on yet another forced march to a day of hard labor, he thought of his wife. He said,

I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out (during all my prison life there was no outgoing or incoming mail); but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as vivid and just as satisfying. “Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death.”

He goes on to explain in his book that finding meaning in the pure passions heals the sick soul in almost any condition. Frankl went through some of the worst suffering ever known in the whole human experience, and spent the rest of his life treating patients with “Logotherapy,” or treatment by finding meaning.

Logotherapy has made its way into tourism. Even when living conditions are good, people yearn for meaning in their lives. Carla Santos, a professor of Sports and Tourism at the University if Illinois, talks of “Genealogical Tourism” and “Cultural Tourism.” She says that many travelers are looking for the charm of antiquity or a peek into ancestors’ lives. She’s onto something, and although it would do her a world of good to read a Strunk & White 4 or 5 times, and maybe never pick up J.P. Sartre again,  she has a point in all of her tortured academic syntax: “Genealogical tourism provides an irreplaceable dimension of material reality that’s missing from our postmodern society.” Translation: “in a confusing world, people are looking for authenticity and meaning.” Given the few dreadful quotes attributed to her, I think save myself the irritation of parsing her orotund syntax and skip her article in the Journal of Travel Research, but I’ll run with the ideas.

Here are a few notions of what a trek for meaning might be

• Hiking or driving to pictographs, petroglyphs, and pre-Columbian ruins to look into another age. See a different facet of the human experience, and enjoy their art. Talk about the “Charms of Antiquity.”
• Visting ancestral villages and cemeteries. Someday I’ll travel to the Isle of Man just to see where some of my ancestors walked.
• Walk along a stretch of the Old Spanish Trail.
• Revisit the Muley Twist in Canyonlands. I don’t have any ancestors that I know of that used that route to go from west to east across southern Utay, but I’m taken by the story.
• Spend a few days and nights in Canyonlands Salt Creek to see the wall paintings and Ancient Puebloan ruins.

You get the idea.

I hope that the apps I have out so far for Utah’s peaks and national parks help some people find meaning, and I’m just getting started!