Psychologist and author Tara Brach mentioned a quote and a poem in a meditation she offered recently that really moved me.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychologist and Holocaust survivor said, “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.”
That space.
How many times have we reacted and regretted it immediately? We made someone feel bad, we yelled, we pressed send, we wounded with words.
If we breathe or close our eyes or count to ten after the stimulus and before the response, how might our day or year or life change? How might our friends and family and colleagues see us? How might that moment make all the difference?
That space is a little thing. A little thing we can do every single day.
As Martha Postlewaite wrote in her poem The Clearing…
“Do not try to save the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.”
That space is the clearing in the forest of our life. It will allow us to be in the moment, recalibrate, decide and accept.
Creating that space is in our hands. Our power is in our hands. We can choose freedom, peace and growth if we take a moment to sit in our clearing.