“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” ~ Victor E. Frankl
You may recall those old “choose-your-own- adventure” novels written for schoolage kids.
At the end of each chapter, the reader was given a selection of options the characters could take. Depending on the one you chose, you would flip to the noted page in the book and continue the story.
The older I get the more convinced I am the “choose-your-own-adventure” model is pretty accurate. There are no obvious chapter breaks or clear multiple-choice options, and sometimes the smallest decisions of attitude and intention have more of an impact than the “big” decisions and actions that seem obvious.
One of the few assigned books I remember reading from high school (I read them, I just don’t remember them), was “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl. Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna when the Nazis started rounding up the Jews, and anyone else they didn’t like. Frankl was sent to the concentration camp in Auschwitz. The book details his experiences as a prisoner from a psychological perspective.
I needed something to pull me out of a bad case of the blues this weekend and downloaded the audiobook. It’s even better than I remembered, and to my surprise, there’s a great deal of focus on the power of human choice to decide our internal condition, our state of being, regardless of external circumstances.
Life is, basically, a choose-your-own-adventure story, and the choices start from the inside.
