It’s interesting the way we talk about the choices we make with our time. “I got distracted” sounds a lot more like it wasn’t your fault compared to “I chose to spend 30 minutes watching YouTube videos”.
But we are always responsible and always choose what we are doing at some level. Even if it’s clicking on the next YouTube video – which has been engineered to be the most attractive thing possible – there is still a moment of decision.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Viktor Frankl
There are ten thousand things in the world working to make that gap smaller. A culture that wants us to be nothing more than animals responding to stimuli. But within us we all know that we are capable of more. We all have the power to expand the space between stimulus and response, to create growth, and to generate freedom.
The realization that we are capable of more is what drives people to drink themselves to death, to lose themselves in drugs, are to eat their way to obesity. It is the attempt to run away from a ghost that they can’t escape from–their potential, their possibility, the reality that their choices have created.
But no matter how dark it gets or how small the space is, there is always a path back towards redemption. There is always an opportunity to do something better. To say no to your demons, to quit drinking, to use your time better.
There is always an opportunity to do the right thing instead of doing what you’ve always done before.
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