In everyday life, most of us are held back by our sense that our resources are limited and that circumstances control our destiny.
Even if we are successful by society's standards, we restrict our options and behave as if necessity, reasonableness, feasibility, and "the givens" act as natural law, ruling our daily lives.
The conventional assumption that we must "face reality" is without a doubt the greatest single constraint on human imagination, vision, and enterprise. It is an arbitrary, self-imposed limit on our beliefs, especially our belief in what is possible.
What happens when we choose a different place to stand? What happens when we intentionally select the aspects of reality that we want to use as our foundation?
Left blind and deaf by an early childhood illness, Helen Keller said, "So much has been given to me, I have not time to ponder over that which has been denied."
Across the globe in a remote village in Nepal, a grandmother hears that reading and writing classes will be offered in a nearby village. She invests all she has, the equivalent of 12 cents U.S. The program also allows her to be part of a group that rents a loom and starts a weaving business. Two years later, the "poor widow" sees herself as a wealthy woman, so much that she gives money to a sick relative.
"How good it feels that I have so much I can share," she says.
Most of us would be inclined to consider her impoverished, rather than the wealthy woman she knows herself to be. And we might focus on what she, like Helen Keller, had been denied, rather than on the gifts she saw she possessed.
Where we choose to stand shapes what we see as possible.
This idea is a first step toward opening the way for us to do the incredible. Whether we want to influence a country, as Churchill did, or an individual--or even ourselves--the key is how we look at the world, rather than the way the world is.
What might become possible if we chose to have more "unrealistic" moments, if we multiplied them and let them become a larger part of how we meet the world?
No matter how daunting the deficits, we can choose how we will experience life.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
--Viktor Frankl