Choose

Some times, it is almost like you are being TOLD something. In my reading from various sources last week, there was a repeated message about choice.

First I was reminded of Victor Frankl's words:

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response is our growth and our freedom.

Then, as I read my beloved Brainpickings, I came across this from Anne Lamott in her books Stitches:

Most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it…Every time we choose the good action or response -  the decent, the valuable - it builds incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice…

We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch.  This is not helpful if on the inside we understand that the life is more often like a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

It is an art to learn to spot the space to choose. So many of my practices - like my yoga, my journalling - are to help me to do that...to spot the space and respond mindfully and, as a wise and darling friend reminded me, with good intention.