Freedom to choose. By Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD

 

March 2025

 

“So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I like this quote very much. It sings to me, especially after last year’s brush with serious illness and near death. Live abundantly, drink deeply of the springs of existence, don’t waste your time. Live and choose wisely.

 

We may or may not live again, who actually knows. Whether or not consciousness manifests in other bodies after our physical death, this is finally unknowable. Right now, this life we live is it.

 

Too much time in most lives are lived as though what is happening in this instance is just a preparation, a practice run, for a better life. But in this way, the experiences of now are somehow set aside, until we die – meaning lives are spent in anticipation: a dream for perfection, or heaven, or whatever.

 

Frankl’s observation about living now is living in all its messiness. This doesn’t mean just going along mindlessly with whatever crops up; what it does mean is living life with purpose. We are, after all, given free will and a sense of determination for living meaningfully, for us individually and as a community. Enough research has found that when we give up  a sense of a meaningful life we fall into despair and deep depression.

 

Frankl (26 March 1905 – 2 September 1997), neurologist, psychologist, philosopher was a holocaust survivor, spending four years in three concentration camps. He lost his family and his wife and, effectively, was forced into the realization that the search for meaning matters to psychological health. Afterall, what was the point of all the suffering?

 

Several years ago when my brother and I travelled to Estonia to catch up with our relatives there, I asked my Estonian aunt what it was like under Russian rule during USSR times (the Soviet Union only recognized the independence of Estonia in 1991) and said, “Remember you are always free in your mind.” She was Estonia’s first paediatric surgeon, trained in St Petersburg. She knew really tough times, but difficulties didn’t constrict her. Freedom to think, yes, but Frankl goes further, freedom to choose what you respond to. 

 

It is hard not being reactive to everything, and this requires conscious effort.  I was put to the test repeatedly while sick in bed in hospital.  I had to practice equanimity (evenness of mind) on a minute to minute basis and sometimes I succeeded. Sometimes, I really didn’t. My temper flared in the face of what I perceived as the stupidity of others. It flared when things didn’t go smoothly and without fuss. It flared when my breakfast wasn’t the one I’d ordered. It flared when the nurse couldn’t come and elevate my legs to relieve the pressure sores that were forming on my heels. When I was cold and someone had taken away the extra blanket. When…. this and that happened. Suffering is no different a time for practicing self awareness and choosing one’s responses than when everything is going well.

 

How can we achieve equanimity and responding to things that affect us with conscious awareness?

 

“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,” so said Frankl.  This space is not somewhere where the mind is filled with conditioned responses, nor platitudes, but a short interlude in which a fairer response is possible. In Buddhism, this space between in where a compassion arises.  This is what I see the meaning of my life is: to know compassion and express it not just in times of comfort, but stress and awkwardness. We humans are beings of great potential. We can choose cruelty and greed and can choose fairness and love.

Whatever  we choose arises from our decisions, not the conditions in which we find ourselves.  

 

 

Care goes both ways by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD

July 2020

     It’s nice being warm. Too much of my life I’ve had the silly idea that I have to be brave, brave enough to bear the cold, and as I think on this, I realize that with that idea came a tendency not to discard things, just in case I’ll need them later on. How are these two ideas connected, I wonder?

     My mother was Russian-Estonian and half my family are Russian-Estonian, with a tendency to hoard and hold things close to ourselves as though to protect against the cold, all the while bravely putting on a firm resolve to walk hard against the iciness in light clothing. I saw it in my Estonian aunt and my cousins a few years ago on a visit my brother and I did to that part of the world in their winter. They all had that glint in the eye of resolve.

     I watched them put their walking clothes on and it seemed to me that they were not really dressed for snow and ice – and it was freezing out there, but out we’d go, and begin walking, fast. We walked in the snow fields, past the ski jumps; we hurried past the kindly lit, and probably warm, cabins; we just kept on walking. I, in a very familiar way, held in my shivers, and just sought to keep up.

     So here I sit now, snug in new trackie pants and in awe of warm legs. Who would’ve thought! Interestingly, but not so much, in light of my growing awareness, this comes amidst a house clearing where boxes of things and papers have been cast into bins and given away. The family psyche is getting a clean out.

     How many other familiarly held ideas do we have, behaviours, cultural ideas, just the stuff we traditionally do, that take years of shedding? It’s a useful exercise doing what I’m doing now, writing down the little bursts of insight. I had never put together the two ideas described above, till now, sitting, as I am, feeling cozy and warm.

    I’ve written frequently about the importance of connections with one another for good mental health, but now I want to talk about the importance of connecting with oneself. Doing this is ultimately caring for oneself. Christianity only gives lip service to this in the phrase, ‘Love thy neighbour as thy self’, because they also talk a lot about selfless giving. Buddhism, on the other hand, recognizes that the idea of compassion includes oneself in the act of having compassion towards others. Loving is giving and receiving at once in a crux of connection.

      What do I mean ‘connecting with oneself’? Aren’t we ourselves whatever we do? This is true, we are ourselves whatever we do, but much of what we do is out of awareness and we frequently react to certain things, things other people say, or situations, with feral aggression and blind self-hatred.  If we are going to be kind to ourselves, we’ll need to understand ourselves better and be less reactive. Me, being cold in winter, and quietly and interiorly shivering is me not being sufficiently conscious of the indoctrination of my family-borne idea that suffering is good and natural. I am not the suffering of impoverished Russia and downtrodden Estonia, I deserve warmth.

     Connecting fully to oneself is emerging through the fog of disconnection and being able to choose wisely who else to connect with. Again, this is something I am still learning about and in learning, I am better able to pick my causes as well as my connections.

     Many people think that looking after oneself is selfish and uncaring towards others. Nothing could be further from the truth. Self-care is not egocentric, it is simply looking after oneself as we would care for another loved person or animal. Self-care recognizes that any love we have for another is really the same as the love we give ourselves. When St. Francis called his body, Brother Ass, this was not to beat himself up, but to nurture the beast that he knew he was. We need taking care of and when we look after ourselves, we are better able to care for others. Care goes both ways.