My Responseability

Between a stimulus (event) and the response there is response-ability.
As Jennifer Aniston used to say in a shampoo commercial "Pay attention, here comes the science part."

Victor Frankl was a determinist brought up in the tradition of Freudian psychology. They postulate that whatever happens to you as a child shapes your character and personality and basically governs your whole life. The limits and parameters of your life are set and there's not much you can do about it.
Frankl was a psychiatrist and a Jew and was imprisoned in the Nazi death camps of World War II. He lost his parents, wife and brother and saw many atrocities that don't bear repeating.

One day, alone and naked in a cell, he became aware of what he termed "the last of the human freedoms" - a freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Victor Frankl was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response. That last sentence warrants reading again, I reckon. While they had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment, Victor had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He visualised himself lecturing his students after the war, describing himself in the classroom giving them the lessons that he was learning during his very torture. (Reproduced in part from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

So what does this mean for us? It means that between an event that occurs to us and our response to that event, we can choose what our response is. We can slow time right down, take a look at our programming and knee-jerk reactions and see that, by using the 'last of our human freedoms' we can make better decisions. Through our observations of ourselves, we can make better choices. It means we can now take responsibility for our actions and our circumstances. You get fired, the knee jerk reaction could be panic and resentment towards your former employers. Or you could stop and re-direct your thoughts, you now have the free time to finish your online marketing project that has been swilling around in your mind. You no longer have to take instruction from a person that you don't particularly respect and you now have more time with the kids. Perhaps someone is rude and abusive to you, your initial reaction would be to give them a piece of your mind and mirror their abuse. Or perhaps you could stop to listen to why they're adopting that attitude (and probably wonder how unhappy their life must be) instead of preparing your response in your head. (This is one of the key impediments to good listening).

Within us all is this great freedom, a freedom to exercise choice through thought, imagination, creativity, independent will and self awareness.

So I ask you this, how often do you exercise this ability, this freedom, this inalienable right to choose what you think? Because if you're just going along with the herd, are you truly free?