Response-Ability
Last week after I challenged all of us, myself included, to go twenty-four hours without complaining, I received an unusually high number of communications. Apparently, I am not alone in wanting to break the habit of complaining. One comment from a reader especially stood out, “I didn’t realize that not complaining was actually a choice I could make.” Complaining can become so automatic it seems, that we forget that we always have a choice as to how we respond to what we are experiencing.
In 1946, Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, wrote a highly respected book, Man’s Search for Meaning, about his experience of surviving a concentration camp during World War II. The central point of this profound book is that no matter how bad things are around us, nothing can ever take away the fact that we still have a choice about how we will respond. This quote is the central point of the book.
“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.”
Responding is different than reacting, in that it involves our choosing the response we wish to make in any given situation. People with a more advanced degree of emotional and spiritual wellness realize that they have available to them a wide variety of responses in every situation. They are able to intentionally choose how to respond when they find themselves in stressful situations. Reacting, on the other hand, is more automatic and unconscious, Reactions are not well thought out, they just seem to happen.
Whichever choice we make, to react or respond, our choice will serve to create a cycle that either escalates or escalates stress, both within ourselves and between ourselves and others.
Every day we have hundreds of choices about how we will react or respond to what is happening around us. Complaining is just one of those things we can decide to do or not. Refraining from complaining is a conscious choice that is always available to us. I know for myself, and from the many readers I heard from, it is not an easy choice. Even though it is not easy, it is good to remember that we are ones “response-able” for our choices.
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