“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.”
It would be nice to say that I had an awakening or an epiphany that changed the way I lived forever all at once.
The older I get, the more I feel like that isn’t how change works.
I’ve had, what I thought were life changing epiphanies, repeatedly. Life changing visions, repeatedly. Life changing moments, repeatedly. I thought after X or Y happened to me that I would live differently from that point onward.
Habits always win out however. Choices, actions done repeatedly make our lives.
The concept of Stimulus-Space-Response was a concept I first learned from a rented audio book by Stephen Covey. He was telling the story of Holocaust survivor Dr. Victor Frankl.
Learning about that concept I can still remember thinking, in the library I was listening to the audiobook in; that this was going to change my life from that point on.
I thought my depression, laziness, anxieties would all be instantly and forever changed now that I knew that there was a space between stimulus and response.
I get to choose how I respond?! I can cultivate and grow that space?!! Surely this will change my life immediately. I will only make good choices now. I will only do right actions.
The older I get, the more I feel like that isn’t how change works.
But learning about Stimulus-Space-Response is one of the closest things I’ve ever experienced to an epiphany that stuck. I suppose a more apt metaphor would be that of a seed being planted. A seed of lasting change was planted that day.
Stephen Covey also used farming as an analogy for change and for life. I may have planted the seed(s) for growth, but I failed to tend to the soil properly with patience and persistence. Then the harvest was nothing.
It is a great concept that more people should know about. The knowledge that we can choose what happens to us no matter what happens. Because we have the ability to think, perceive, and assign meaning in our brain. Unlike most animals.
I think most people are unaware of this. I know I was. I think most people think that to live, is to live reactively. Just reacting to whatever happens to us and around us whether good, bad, or indifferent.
But we can choose to stop, breath, think, and choose.
It’s no magic pill, no such thing of course. But it can help. It helps me.
Anarchy Journal Constitutional 