Today we celebrate...

Independence

“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

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian born neurologist and psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and went on to live to the age of 92. He published a pioneering psychological/spiritual work in 1959, entitled, Man's Search for Meaning, which chronicled his experience in the death camps. He found that those who survived more or less intact, managed it because they found meaning in their lives even with the constant daily specter of starvation and death. He reported that whether or not these people died in the camp, they carried with them a freedom of spirit that could not be taken from them.

Today is Independence Day in America. Yesterday, I heard the Declaration of Independence being read aloud. It was a profoundly moving experience. We so take for granted the freedoms we have in this country; we forget that what that document gave us was the responsibility to govern ourselves, not just the right. We rant and rave about our government's failures, but on election day, only half of us bother to vote, fewer than that in the primaries. We're fond of saying that freedom is not free, but rarely do we place responsibility for that on our own shoulders. If America has passed its time of being a “beacon to the world” it is because we no longer take freedom seriously on an individual basis. As responsible citizens, we have an obligation to support freedom by actively engaging in the institutions that ensure it.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space in which we can choose. We can stand back and throw rocks, or we can man-up and take responsibility for the freedoms we love.

                                             In the Spirit,

                                                   Jane