At the very young age of 16 years, during my first undergrad year, I kept asking all these questions to my professor of history of psychology... and he kept saying, Olga, you should talk to Lucía Cuéllar Ospina, the professor in humanistic and existential psychology, so I applied to her course the year after. That was it, I was captivated by a school of psychotherapy that coincided with my values and my understanding of life, and felt in love with many books! I also found in Lucía a professor who trusted me and saw so much potential in me, so she has been mentoring me ever since. Viktor Frankl’s theories have also helped me to embrace the hardest moments of my life with more resilience. Nowadays, I keep receiving messages and calls everyday from people asking me: wait, how are you gonna get to Bergen now? What will happen with your job? What are you going to do? Well, I don’t know🤷♀️🤣, although I am sketching a plan. I have my hours of fair enough despair and inpatience, but then I think about Frankl, who survived to 4 concentration camps during the II World War, then earned 29 PhD’s and wrote so many books, and did so many cool stuff.
Then, I remember two things in special. First of all, there is a meaning to life, no matter what. I don’t need to have a clear answer to it, I don’t need to understand it rationally, I trust it. There is a meaning to me being alive, right here, right now. This takes me to the second one: I can create values, experience values and work on my attitude if there is a circumstance which is out of my control. That’s it, it takes me some more minutes to come back to this awareness some days and still I am doing this task of being alive the human way. The simple question of: What can I do for others today? Keeps my head above the waters of uncertainty. Then something happens which I cannot explain as much, and the more I write these days, the more I put my focus on creating, the more aliveness I feel.