I don’t know about you, but I keep hearing that we are “living in historical times.” This felt particularly true during the recent war with Iran – between the stealth attacks, the bombings, the waiting and worrying, it felt more like historical fiction or an action movie than real life. And yet, the events of the past few years are very, very real.
One of the quotes that has moved me the most in my life is by Victor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space.” So often, we spend our days reacting to what comes at us. Without thinking, we respond. And it’s all too easy to forget that there are multiple ways we could respond – it’s up to us to choose which one.
Frankl famously survived the Holocaust, and it is no accident that from Frankl to Edith Eger’s The Choice, much of the literature on choosing our response comes from Holocaust survivors. They teach us that even when terrible things are happening around us, even when we feel that we are helpless to just react to what comes our way, we still have a choice.
When the world feels like it’s falling around us, we can still choose what we do next – because when stimulus comes our way, we can create a space to choose our response.
