freedom to choose

Viktor Frankl was a world-renowned Austrian psychiatrist who wrote a remarkable book, “Man’s search for Meaning”. He was captured by the Nazi and spent three horrifying years in the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau. He described, in vivid details, the trauma, degradation, tortures, and suffering, he endured during his years of capture. He had to walk through snow, and mud, with no socks, and frost bitten toes sticking through the holes of his shoes. He described how the Nazi tortured him, bashed his head with their rifle butts, and how it felt to witness friends and relatives stuffed into gas chambers or buried alive. At the end of each day, he and his fellow prisoners would be fed with a cup of diluted soup, with a single pea at the bottom of the cup – as their daily ration. He related of how he had to sleep in his own excrement. According to Viktor Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedom – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Moral of the Story
The one thing that we have control of is our choice of how we react to circumstances. Nobody can make us angry, or cause us to feel bad. We have to choose it ourselves. So the next time when you are confronted with these circumstances, pause for a moment and realize that you have a choice on how to react to it. It is not what happens to us, that determines our successes or failures, but rather how we react to what happens to us.

Have a fantastic day!!