Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA, the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
Today we will speak about the important concept that man controls what's going on inside of him.
Our first point on this topic was that man wants to be in control of what's outside of him. Our second point was that certain people believe that their area of control should not be themselves. They think, ‘Who said God wants you to perfect yourself? God made you, he perfected you. Is there room for you to perfect yourself?’
And now, for our third point- Can you perfect yourself? Yes, but you have to believe in freedom of choice. Rav Hutner, quoted by Rav Wolbe, said that the final frontier of heresy is going to be the heresy that you can no longer choose. It’s a little confusing, because there definitely are areas that you can’t choose. There are areas of mental illness where a person no longer has freedom of choice- to a point. But there's always an area where you can move the envelope or push the bar a little higher, in what you can or can't choose.
Our third and final point, which we need for the full picture, comes from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, quoting Viktor Frankl, a Jewish concentration camp survivor, whom we've quoted many a time. I'd like to share this point verbatim:
“One day, all alone in a small room, Viktor Frankl began to become aware of what he later called the last of the human freedoms- the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment; they could do what they wanted to his body. But Viktor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him (the stimulus) and his response to it was his freedom or power to choose that response.”
That’s the ultimate freedom of choice- your ability to control what's going on.
(We'll make a little addendum- that the Nazis could not control what was going on. Only God controls what's going on.)
Ultimately, what you can control is how you react and ultimately, how you fix yourself.
Another quote from the book:
“The Nazis had more liberty, more options to choose from in their environment, but he had more freedom.”
(He's using a made up term, liberty, versus freedom.)
“He had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. And finally, in the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.”
That's really what life is all about. Life is all about making the right decisions in circumstances. Life is not about you controlling the outcomes. Life is not about accomplishing. Life is about looking inward, making the right choices and fixing yourself to the best of your ability. That, you are in control of -whatever your area of freedom of choice may be. For one person, the choice is whether to get out of bed in the morning. For another person, it's whether to finish a page of Gemara. For another person, it might be whether or not to commit suicide. Everyone has their area of freedom of choice. When they make those decisions, they are perfecting themselves and doing what they're supposed to be doing in life.
If you understand that and live by that, you'll be a happy person, because you are in control of what you need to be in control of. Nobody can take that away from you. This is extremely important, and it’s the difference between the Amalek outlook and the Jewish outlook. We focus on controlling ourselves, which is the area in which we can truly make a difference. No one can take that away from us, and we're always in control of that.
Therefore, start off your day by saying, I have what to do today. What are you supposed to do? Well, you believe that Hashem put you in a position, and you have to make the right decisions in the position that Hashem put you in. That's the whole story, and it’s extremely good for your emotional wellness.