Whenever we find ourselves stuck in a rut, feeling bad about life and our place in it, the first human instinct is to blame our woes on other people and external conditions. We feel imprisoned, believing we can’t be elsewhere or do otherwise. In reality, there are almost always myriad choices about what to do in any given moment if we are in the proper frame of mind to see them, with many paths out of our personally created—or at least maintained—hell. But even when choices truly are slim and the external reality truly grim, we always have a choice about how we respond. We always have a choice about what state of consciousness we bring into this world.
“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.” ~Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“Whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly… If you can neither enjoy nor bring acceptance to what you do—stop. Otherwise, you are not taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be the one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness. And if you are not taking responsibility for your state of consciousness, you are not taking responsibility for life.” ~Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
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