The Power to Choose

 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.

—Viktor Frankl

 

Last week, I took in a very interesting interview of Stephen Fry by Jordan Peterson.  It can be found on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFFSKedy9f4.   Now I have not generally been a great fan of Jordan Peterson given his rather confrontational style to people younger than himself  and their perhaps at times over the top reactions to challenges in their life.  I have been a great fan of Fry as a Renaissance man of great intelligence, creativity, and erudition.  In the interview, in which my assessment of Peterson rose a few notches, they discussed a very interesting image of how people might react if they were on a rather unstable boat which began to tip to one side and was threatening to overturn.  One of them, perhaps Peterson, postulated that everyone would run to the other side of the boat causing it to over turn the other way.  He put this in terms of consciousness saying that because the people were conscious of the original instability, they would react in a way that caused the very thing they were trying to avoid.   In my view, I believe that it would be due to insufficient consciousness.  The people involved would have reacted instinctively without having the ability to choose their response.  Now I must caution that I may have some of the details of this wrong as my memory can be less than perfect and I may have skewed the details to fit my premise.  However, I believe the premise is accurate. 

Originally, when I came across the quote from Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and best know for his classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning, I planned to reflect on the quote regarding the difficulty of people actually being able to choose in a conscious manner not unlike those people on the unstable boat.  However, the revelation last week of the discovery of the buried remains of 215 children at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School motivated me to shift my focus this morning.

The question facing Canadians this morning is, in the space between the stimulus i.e., the terrible revelation of the effect of the terrible chapter in Canadian history and our responses, is how do we choose to respond to that information?  As a middle class, now more than middle-aged, white Canadian man, my reaction may be to run to the other side of that rather unstable boat of the Canadian treatment of indigenous peoples in our history which continues to the present day in many respects.   I can say that this revelation is evidence of a terrible chapter in our history but it is one that has affected me in only peripheral ways in my life.  I can also perhaps choose to acknowledge and be at least somewhat conscious that I have been a beneficiary of a system of Government which was built, in part, on the Governments’ treatment of indigenous people which broke or ignored treaties and treated indigenous people as at least second-class citizens at best and less than human at worse.  This is not a comfortable place to be – on the other side in reaction to the boat tipping further off kilter. 

I have had a few excursions into the unstable waters of indigenous history in Canada.  I participated in a Blanket Ceremony while studying theology and have been in gatherings where I have been purified by sweet grass.  These entered my consciousness for a while but did not stay in my conscious awareness to a great extent. 

The knowledge of the discovery of the remains was shocking to me and I am left in the uncomfortable position of not knowing how I can choose to respond to that stimulus.  I will have to sit with that uncomfortable tension and see what is born out of it.  I hope that it will be, in the words of Friedrich Von Hugel, ‘divinely intended tension’.

Blessings on your journey through these troubled waters.