Meaning & change.

Sometimes things just don't fit any more: your work, your relationship, the way you live. You feel that something has to change, but you don't know what or how. Or something changes that you didn't choose: a reorganisation, a loss, an illness. In this theme you'll find everything together on meaning, values, making choices and coping with change and loss.

Good luck!

someone looking out over a landscape at the start of a path

Your own course, even when things go against you.

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Course · 8 lessons · in Dutch

ACT: Setting your own course

For anyone who notices they're avoiding things, fighting what they feel or no longer knowing what they stand for. Eight lessons on acceptance, your thoughts, your values and taking the step together with the discomfort, based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Start with lesson 1

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Video

Searching? You're really not the only one

Questions about meaning and direction, or a change you didn't choose: it happens to people you'd never expect, too. A few of them:

Between 1942 and 1945 the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived four concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and lost his wife, his parents and his brother there. In 1946 he wrote, in nine days, the book known in English as Man's Search for Meaning. His conclusion, borrowing a line from Nietzsche: he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. It isn't your circumstances that decide whether your life has meaning, but how you relate to them.

Michelle Obama was working as a lawyer at a large Chicago firm when her best friend Suzanne died at 25 in 1990, and her father in 1991. In her memoir Becoming (2018) she writes that only then did she dare admit she didn't enjoy the work she had studied so hard for. She resigned, took a big pay cut and went to work for the City of Chicago. A swerve, she calls it: not the path laid out for her, but her own.

Maarten van der Weijden was nineteen when he was diagnosed with acute leukaemia in 2001. After chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant he returned to the pool, and in 2008 he won Olympic gold in the ten-kilometre open water race. He says he doesn't believe he beat the disease by fighting; he was lucky and had good doctors. In 2019 he swam the Elfstedentocht, almost two hundred kilometres in three days, raising millions for cancer research.

In 1995 Wim Hof lost his wife Olaya, who took her own life after years of mental health problems. He was left with four young children and a grief he had no words for. The cold water he had been swimming in for years became his anchor: there, his head went quiet. From that daily plunge grew the method that made him world-famous as The Iceman.