FROM INHERITED BELIEF TO PRACTISED MEANING

Most people inherit their philosophy before they construct one. The framework of belief that orders a childhood life is rarely chosen. It’s received from our families, from the culture that surrounds us, and from a religious or moral tradition passed down to us through a variety of ways. For a great many of us, the question of whether the inherited framework can carry the weight of an actual life doesn’t become urgent until the framework appears to fail. If it fails, what one does next determines a great deal.

I want to set down here, in as much honesty as I can, the trajectory by which my own working philosophy was constructed. Not in a single moment of insight. Not in a clean replacement of one system with another. But through years of practice, reading, struggle, and slow integration, in which one framework gave way to a deeper one and then another. What I now have is not any single tradition but a working synthesis I continue to refine. This is a description of how I constructed the working philosophy I now hold. Exploring one’s philosophy matters. How else is one to decide if the philosophy is inherited or agreed with and then practised. 

The Inherited Framework

For much of my early life I held to the Christian moral framework I’d inherited. To my understanding of that inheritance, morality was determined by divine law. Sin was an offence against God, requiring repentance and absolution. Guilt was the proper consequence of wrongdoing, a moral and spiritual burden borne until it was relieved by genuine contrition. Forgiveness was not a choice but a duty, owed to others irrespective of whether the wrong had been acknowledged, repented of, or amended. Marriage was a sacred covenant. And the obligation to forgive within it was absolute.

My understanding of the framework gave me a clear moral structure. It also gave me, when I was young enough not to question it, a stable orientation in the world. I knew what was right and what was wrong, what was required of me and what was forbidden. There is value in such an inheritance, and I want to be honest about it. A child without a moral framework is a child without footing. The framework I was given was, by the standards of the world in which I grew up, sound. It taught me discipline, accountability, the importance of conscience, the seriousness of one’s word.

It was a framework I had inherited, not one I believed by serious choice – something I didn’t understand until much later. That lack of belief by choice made me vulnerable. The framework seemed to demand responses at odds with what my own reasoning could endorse. It appeared to bind me to self-imposed guilt where guilt wasn’t earned. It bound me to obligations of forgiveness in circumstances where I felt forgiveness was neither rational nor deserved. I found there was a tension between the religious teaching of unconditional absolution and the natural, human response to injustice. For years, I assumed the tension was a defect in me. I now believe it was a sign that I had inherited the framework which made it inadequate to the life I wanted to live.

The First Failure

The reckoning came through a profound breach of trust within a marriage I’d entered with the seriousness that the covenant required. The breach was prolonged. It was knowing. When it was eventually acknowledged and forgiveness was sought, the inherited script told me what I should do. I should grant it. Holding resentment was itself, I had been taught, a moral failure. Forgiveness would be the path back to peace.

Yet the hurt that I had endured prevented me from escaping my own reasoning. Why was I to forgive someone who had knowingly violated trust over an extended period? Why was the responsibility for releasing them from their guilt mine to bear? On one hand, the inherited framework told me to let go. On the other, my personal sense of justice and self-respect told me that forgiveness, if it meant anything at all to me, should be earned rather than granted automatically. The conflict was not academic. It was a daily lived condition. I couldn’t function inside it.

This forced me, for the first time, to question fundamental ideas I’d previously accepted without challenge. Is forgiveness always the morally superior choice? Should one feel guilty for refusing to absolve someone who has caused deliberate harm? Is sin even a meaningful concept outside of religious doctrine? What does justice mean to me?

The questions didn’t destroy the inherited framework all at once. They exposed what seemed to me to be its incompleteness. The framework appeared to only give me rules. I couldn’t find a way of locating meaning within circumstances that didn’t yield to rules. I needed something more. I didn’t know what that something more was.

The Stoic Encounter

In the slow work of rebuilding my inner life to my satisfaction, while simultaneously navigating the divorce and the rebuilding of the family business, I discovered first the Stoic tradition.

I read the philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, not as an academic exercise, but rather as someone who needed a workable discipline for surviving the day in front of me. I began with his book, Meditations. It is, in a sense, his journal. The private notebook of a man who was both emperor of Rome and a working philosopher, addressing himself in the second person, and reminding himself of the code by which he was attempting to live. By reading Meditations, I was overhearing the inner discipline of someone who knew that the only territory that is truly his to govern is the inner one.

The Stoic tradition offered me a different relationship with my own circumstances. It taught me the dichotomy of control - that external events are beyond our control, but we have complete control over how we respond to them. Reason as the foundation of virtue, rather than, as I saw it, obedience to divine commandment. The inner citadel, the part of the self that cannot be touched by external misfortune unless we permit it. Amor fati, the love of fate, the discipline of accepting what cannot be changed, not, in my view, with resignation, but with a kind of fierce affirmation. Negative emotions such as resentment and anger were not virtuous. Nor were they to be suppressed. They were to be examined, understood, and, where possible, released through my own reasoning.

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.47

When I applied the Stoic discipline, it produced a different reading of the hurt and circumstances I’d been living through. The actions of the person who had caused the harm were their own moral responsibility, not mine. I didn’t need to carry guilt over withholding forgiveness. I had the power to decide whether forgiveness had been earned. In this case, I believed it had not. I didn’t need to be consumed by anger or resentment, but neither did I need to grant what I saw as unearned forgiveness. Instead of dwelling on what had happened, I could accept it, learn from it, and continue. For the first time, I felt a measure of freedom from what I believed was imposed guilt. I no longer experienced forgiveness as an obligation.

The Stoic encounter also gave me a daily practice. The morning preparation, in which one orients oneself toward the day. The evening review, in which one examines the day that has passed. The continual return to what is within one’s control and what is not. The discipline requires only the willingness to attend to one’s inner life on a daily basis. I began to keep a journal in September 2008. I’ve continued to journal ever since.

The Humanist Reinforcement

Alongside Stoicism, a humanist sensibility reinforced what I’d felt to be right. Where Christianity appears to externalise morality to a divine being, humanism locates it in human reasoning about human well-being. Ethical principles do not require divine sanction. They rest on integrity, on responsibility for one’s actions, on a focus on justice rather than on grace. Through a humanist lens, I redefined the moral categories that I felt had previously bound me. Sin, as a religious concept, ceased to have explanatory power for me. What mattered was ethical behaviour and personal integrity, not obedience to divine law. Guilt should serve a purpose. If it leads to growth or repair, it is useful. If it does not, it is unproductive. Forgiveness is earned, not given freely.

I should be careful here, because the move out of Christianity is easily read as a rejection of everything in Christianity. That wasn’t my experience, and it wouldn’t be honest to describe it that way. Much of what Christianity gave me, I retain. The seriousness of conscience. The conviction that how one treats others is the central test of a life. The understanding that some things are sacred. What I let go was not the ethical seriousness of the tradition. It was the seeming outsourcing of moral judgement to a system that appeared to demand responses my own reasoning couldn’t endorse. The humanist sensibility allowed me to live by my own ethical standards, by my own rules, while still retaining the moral seriousness that the earlier tradition at its best had taught me.

Frankl and the Architecture of Meaning

The deepest shift was still to come. Stoicism gave me the daily discipline. Humanism gave me the ethical framework. Neither, on its own, gave me the architecture for locating meaning in protracted struggle. That came through Viktor Frankl.

I read Man’s Search for Meaning not as theory but as a testimony. The first half of that book describes Frankl’s survival in the Nazi concentration camps. The second half describes the framework he constructed from that survival. What reached me first wasn’t the framework, but the discipline of the witness. A man who had lost his wife, his parents, his brother, his work, his freedom, and every external possession was telling me that even in those circumstances meaning was possible. The claim earned itself through what he had endured. By the time the theoretical architecture arrived, I was prepared to receive it.

Frankl’s framework rests on three sources of meaning.

Firstly, there is the meaning we create through what we give to the world. Through work, through deeds, through the bringing into being something that didn’t exist before. He called these ‘Creative Values’.

Then there are his ‘Experiential Values’. The meaning we receive through encounter, through love, through the experience of beauty and of being known.

And finally, and most importantly, there are what he calls ‘Attitudinal Values’. The meaning we make through the stance we take toward that which we cannot change. It is the last of human freedoms, the choice of one’s response when no other choice remains.

Frankl placed the attitudinal value highest, because it’s the meaning that is still available even when all others have been stripped away. A person in a death camp cannot create. They may not be able to love. But they can choose the bearing in which they meet their fate. That choice, Frankl insisted, is the irreducible ground of human dignity.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

It was the attitudinal value that did the most work for me. I couldn’t undo what had happened in the marriage. I couldn’t return the years to their prior condition. I couldn’t unlive the damage. What I could choose was the stance I would take toward what had occurred. Not the stance of what I thought of as forced forgiveness. Nor the stance of resentment. The stance of someone who refuses to allow what cannot be changed to dictate what can. Frankl called this, ‘tragic optimism’. It is not the optimism of denial. It is the optimism of those who have looked clearly at what is unavoidable, and have, nonetheless found a reason to continue.

The Convergence

The longer I lived inside both traditions, the more I came to see that they answered different questions I’d had. The Stoic discipline answered the question of how I would get through today. The Franklian framework answered the question of why I would persist toward tomorrow. Marcus Aurelius gave me the morning. Frankl gave me the horizon. The two aren’t in competition. They are complementary.

A practice grounded in Stoicism without the Franklian architecture risks becoming a mere discipline of endurance, holding the present together with no reason to look forward.

A practice grounded in Frankl without the Stoic discipline risks becoming an aspiration that cannot meet the demands of the actual day. The integration of the two is what produced, for me, something close to a complete working philosophy.

I claim no originality in noticing this convergence. Both traditions have always implied each other. Aurelius would have recognised Frankl as a brother across the centuries, and Frankl explicitly drew on Stoic resources in his own thinking. What I claim is only the practical insight that comes from having both as daily companions. A morning that begins with Aurelius and a horizon that holds Frankl is a different kind of day than one informed by either alone.

Concurrent Meaning-Making

The conventional account of transformation suggests that suffering and meaning operate sequentially. First one endures. Then one emerges. Then one lives. The implication is that meaning is awarded at the end of suffering, as a kind of compensation for what one has been through.

The truth I have lived is different. Meaning is not awarded at the end of suffering. It’s forged within it, alongside it, often in spite of it. The work of transformation doesn’t begin after the difficulty resolves. It happens concurrently, across every area of life simultaneously, imperfectly, and at considerable cost. I’ve called this, ‘concurrent meaning-making’. I see it as the connective tissue between the Stoic and the Franklian practice.

If one believes that life resumes only after suffering ends, one waits. One puts living on hold. One treats the period of difficulty as a corridor to be passed through rather than as part of the life itself. This is, in my observation, one of the most common errors among those navigating protracted adversity. They forfeit the only life available to them while waiting for a future life that doesn’t come on the terms they have imagined. The truth is that life is occurring through the difficulty, not after it. The work of meaning is being done now, or it is not being done at all.

I want to be careful not to romanticise this. Concurrent meaning-making doesn’t claim that suffering is good or that it is justified by the meaning you can extract from it. Rather, it’s that meaning can be forged within suffering, and doing so is the only way to ensure that suffering doesn’t have the final word. Meaning doesn’t erase suffering. It doesn‘t redeem it. It simply ensures that the suffering isn’t the whole story.

The Discipline of Peace

My life now is a daily practice rather than periodic reflection. It’s journaling, reading, gym, walking, the morning preparation and the evening review. It’s the conscious attention to creative values, the deliberate cultivation of experiential ones, and the steady, unromantic willingness to choose one’s stance toward what cannot be changed.

The peace I now experience isn’t the peace of resolution. The circumstances that produced the original crisis are long past, but the integration of the Stoic discipline and Franklin meaning-making I am describing isn’t contingent on resolution. It’s the peace that comes from having built something I can live by. The inherited framework was, for me, only external. What I replaced it with is self-constructed, tested, and continually maintained. It rests on a small number of convictions that form the structure I have come to live within.

Meaning is not awarded at the end of suffering. It is forged within it, alongside it, often despite it. Endurance, transformation, and life happen concurrently, imperfectly, and at cost.

Forgiveness is not an obligation, but a considered act, granted where as far as I’m concerned, it serves integrity and withheld where it does not. The freedom not to forgive is, for me, as important as the freedom to forgive. Both should remain available if either is to mean anything.

The stance we take toward what we cannot change is in itself a form of authorship. We don’t get to choose every chapter of the life we’re given. We do get to choose the attitude with which we meet it. This is the last of human freedoms and, in extremity, the only one.

What I am left with is not certainty. It is a clearer relationship with the questions that matter to me, and a discipline I continue to practise. Peace, I believe, is not a position one reaches; it’s a practice one maintains. The architecture I have built may need to be amended again, as life makes further demands of it. It’s not a finished position, but a continuing construction. It is a practised life.