Commentary on frustration cont’d
So if you were to ask why we sometimes experience frustration in life, the external factors – as we already mentioned in Part 58 – are aplenty. And I don’t mean to belittle them. But the internal factors, to my mind, are the ones that should concern us more. Why? In part because a disease that is unseen is more dangerous than one that is seen. Precisely because it is seen, you can react to it, attend to it. Not so if you don’t even notice it in the first place.
So it does well to acknowledge that our frustrations in life start on the inside long before they start on the outside.
What then can we do about it?
St. Augustine is that great African saint who had a rather debaucherous youth but at the same time was incredibly bright. In his search for professional prestige, for peace of heart and for meaning in life, he went through all sorts of philosophies and religions, he had an affair from when he was 17, fathered a son who died in his teens, and skipped from religion to religion before his final conversion to the Faith. Looking back on his youth, he reflected and wrote that the frustration he went through – and that many of us go through today – sprouts from a lack of unity of life. We get frustrated because we have no clear sense of direction in life. Because we have no clear sense of direction in life, all the different aspects of our life seem not to make any sense at all. As we mentioned in Part 59, it seems and feels as if each different aspect of our life is headed full-steam ahead in its own direction. And we experience this as a tormenting tension, meaninglessness… frustration.
Augustine’s recommended remedy was to seek unity of life. If all the different aspects of our life are like different segments of the circumference of a circle, then we can attain control over them, we can gain meaning or unity of life by seeking and remaining at the centre of the circle. The centre of a circle rules each segment of the circumference equally. Becoming obsessed with any particular segment means that we get closer and closer to it and thus gain more control over it. But it also means that we necessarily move further and further away from the centre, and consequently lose control over the rest of the circumference – over the other aspects of our life. We seek and remain at the centre of the circle through a tag-team of human and supernatural virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude together with faith, hope and charity.
Here are two of his quotations that could shed some more light on the matter.
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