The Space

Stephen Covey tells of a life-changing experience that happened in a library, of all places! He had some time on his hands one day and decided to wander through the local library. Pulling a book from one of the shelves, he read the following words:

Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.
In those choices lie our growth and our happiness.

He writes, “An awareness of our freedom and power to choose is affirming…it can also threaten, even terrify, because suddenly we’re responsible. If we’ve 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.”

To a great extent, we have given up the concept of responsibility in our culture, and replaced it with the concept of blame. If we can blame someone else for our behaviors, we don’t have to take responsibility ourselves. This is the point of my previous blog concerning the firing of Don Imus – we made him a scapegoat for our own love of titillation and the outrageous. The rise in lawsuits, blaming others for our own irresponsibility (like supposedly not knowing the coffee in the cup would burn us if we spilled it!), is another case in point. Too, if I can blame my parents for my problems, then I don’t have to take responsibility for changing them.

But, in the process of giving up responsibility and replacing it with the mindset of victimism and blame, we have given up something else, something we claim to love, something we say we will even die for, and that is freedom. When we play the victim, when we place blame for our actions on others, when we think the responsibility for our choices lies outside our control, we give up our freedom and become slaves to our genetics, our environment, our upbringing, and our education (or lack thereof). We talk about being the “product” of our “nature or nurture.” While these factors do play a part in how we see the world, and, at times, the range of choices we have, we are only defined by our genetic make-up or by our upbringing if we choose to be defined by them.

There is still that space between what happens to us and how we respond to it, and that space is sacred – it is our God-given gift of freedom; freedom to try a different response; freedom to do things differently than our parents did, or our culture does, or even what our own appetites and urges would have us do.

In Deuteronomy 30:19, after Moses has finished sharing with the people of Israel all of the laws that God has given him on the mountain, Moses gives this charge to the people: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”

From the very beginning, in the Garden of Eden, God has given us freedom – the freedom to choose. And, from the very beginning, when the man and woman made bad choices, they tried to place blame outside themselves, the man blaming the woman and the woman blaming the serpent.

But, the downside of blaming, of not taking responsibility, is that we also give up our freedom…our freedom to choose life, and if we do not have the freedom to choose, where is our hope for a future that is different from the past?

Twelve step programs have a wonderful definition for insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Our hope for sanity and life is not in helplessly claiming we are who we are and there’s nothing we can do about it, but in using that space between stimulus and response to try a different way, to make a different choice.

May we always be aware of the space that lies between what happens to us and our response to it. May we always be aware of the freedom we have to choose life, to choose a different way, even when that means taking responsibility for our wrong choices.