“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In those choices lies our growth and our happiness.”
This quote is in Stephen R Covey’s book “8th Habit.”
He goes on to write,
With many who have grown up with unconditional love in supportive circumstances, the space may be very large. With others, due to various genetic and environmental influences, it may be very small. But the key point is, there is still a space there and it is in the use of that space that the opportunity to enlarge it exists. Some with very large space, when facing adverse circumstances, may choose to cave in, thereby reducing the size of the space between stimulus and response. Others with a small space may swim upstream against powerful genetic, social and cultural currents and find their freedom expanding, their growth accelerating and their happiness deepening. The former simply do no open this most priceless of all birthday gifts. Gradually, they become a function more of their conditions than their decisions. The latter, perhaps stumblingly and with great sustained effort, open this priceless gift of freedom to choose and discover the force that releases almost all of the other gifts given at birth.
The maverick psychiatrist R. D. Laing captured in the words below how failing to notice that we have this space kills our ability to change. Humans alone have self-awareness. Read, think about, and then reread this quotation:
“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
An awareness of our freedom and power to choose is affirming because it can excite our sense of possibility, and potential. It can also threaten, even terrify, because suddenly we’re responsible, that is ‘re-sponse-able.” We become accountable. If we have taken shelter over the years in explaining our situation, and problems in the name of past or present circumstances, it is truly terrifying to think otherwise. Suddenly there is no excuse.
I am rereading this book, and this is the part that caught my attention the first time around. It filled me with hope that I could stretch and grow that space between stimulus and response, and that I too would have enough space to remember myself.
The other part I loved was the part that we “failed to notice, we failed to notice.”
My sister in her last message to me suggested that she is seeing a different mother. Perhaps she is seeing what she failed to notice before.
Just because we fail to notice, doesn’t mean that the truth wasn’t always there to notice, but for some reason, perhaps survival, we failed to notice, we failed to notice.
What then do you do with a ‘different’ mother? What steps are you being asked to take, what happens if you take none?
What I believe happens if you begin to take that one step, is that the space will open wider and wider for more steps and more choices, without taking one step, the space gets smaller.
I didn’t know that it gets smaller, that it shrinks, but also so do you. You become less and less of who you are.
I know how difficult it is to make a change, to step out and do one thing differently, but I also can feel the death of self in the no choice mode.
Isn’t it odd that he uses the word ‘taking shelter’ in the failing to notice, but once you do, all excuses fall down!
My sister is standing there trying to decide what kind of mother she is holding in her heart and hands?
What will she see?
Do you see what I see?
That moment in time, where you look down and see what kind of mother you really have, it is not a pretty sight.
It rips through you with such speed and anguish it leaves you forever changed.
The rapid tumbling of emotions and knowing create a torrent of thoughts, past and future slamming into each other each claiming to be the truth, you get left in a place of great distress and unknown, in a very doubtful mind, a messy and confused mind.
For if you didn’t see who your mother really was, then who are you? What else did you fail to notice, what other choices did you blindly make, what parts of your world is really real and how much else is a scam?
It seems to me it is the first block to shatter, the first piece of the flimsily held puzzle, it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back, it was the one missing link, to see a mother who can’t see you.
My first piece was to see my father, but in close succession behind him she fell, and then my whole life was like cascading dominos fell crashing upon each other.
She is either standing there trying to keep the first domino from falling or lying beneath the rubble.
The first domino is shaking, wobbling and tilting, what will she do? Will she prop it up and hold on to it, or will she be too tired and let it all go?
I am waiting for her next move, it is hers to decide and she alone is the one standing with her heart and hands holding the mother domino upright.
Why is it the child who has to let go, why do we have to be the ones to walk away, to ask for space, to be the ones to face the truth? It seems too much to ask.
A child stands hands and heart holding, knowing when she lets go, the mother will fall, what strength it takes to let go!
Surrender seems such a gentle word, unless you have to surrender to the truth.
I M Perfect lady 