There are really only two ways to approach life—as victim or as gallant fighter—and you must decide if you want to act or react, deal your own cards or play with a stacked deck. And if you don’t decide which way to play with life, it always plays with you. —Merle Shain
Being the victim is, or was, uncomfortably familiar to many of us. Perhaps some of us are only now realizing we have choices, that we need not let life happen to us. Becoming responsible to ourselves, choosing behavior, beliefs, friends, activities, that please us, though unfamiliar at first, soon exhilarates us. The more choices we make, the more alive we feel. The more alive we feel, the healthier our choices.
Our aim is recovery. Recovering means participating fully in our lives. It means self-assessment and self-direction. It means trusting to move forward, step by step, choice by choice, knowing all the while that no thoughtful action can trouble us.
Many opportunities to make choices will present themselves today.
The choices I make will satisfy me; they will move me toward my goal of recovery.
Note – This reflection reminds me of the wisdom Victor Frankl developed from his experience in a Nazi concentration camp. Here are three quotes from his timeless classic Man In Search Of Meaning that may help deepen this reflection – Bruce M. …
“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.”
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose”
“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”