Life does not answer our questions, rather it asks them of us.

Introduction
What is the meaning of life? It’s one of those questions that lingers quietly in the background, waiting. Over the years I’ve learned that we don’t get to demand an answer from life — life demands an answer from us.

Viktor Frankl, survivor of the concentration camps, wrote that meaning reveals itself in three ways: through our work, through what we experience, and through how we face suffering. He quoted Nietzsche: “He who has a ‘why’ to live can bear almost any ‘how.’”

For years, I believed my why was running. It gave me discipline, identity, and purpose. Until the day it was taken away.

The Accident
A motor accident ended my running career in an instant. My brother-in-law was killed. I survived — injured, angry, guilty, and lost. Everything I thought gave my life meaning — the miles, the medals, the finish lines — vanished.

In that brokenness, I began to write. It wasn’t noble; it was survival. The words became a lifeline. What began as therapy slowly grew into the Runner’s Guide — a book that, in time, shaped a community and a life’s work.

That was my first answer to life’s question. Writing gave me a structure when chaos was all around me. It gave me something to get up for. It was meaning rediscovered through creation.

The Crucible of Suffering
That wasn’t the last time life asked its hard questions. Addiction, loss, and grief each arrived as new teachers, stripping away illusion and certainty.

In time, I came to understand what Dostoevsky meant when he said we must become worthy of our suffering. To become worthy of it doesn’t mean to glorify pain or pretend it’s good. It means not letting it hollow us out. It means allowing it to refine us — to make us more human, more compassionate, more awake.

“Suffering, faced with courage, can become the forge of transformation.”

Endurance, Reimagined
Today, when I speak about endurance, I’m not talking about running. I’m talking about the ability to keep faith with your humanity — to stand inside your pain and still create, still love, still tell the truth.

Endurance, for me, has become another word for meaning. It is not about denying suffering, but about carrying it bravely enough that it changes you — and maybe, in some small way, changes the world around you.

That, for now, is the answer I’ve given back to life’s question. And I suspect life will keep asking.

When has suffering asked something of you? How did you answer — with resistance, with surrender, or with transformation?