Words can be powerful, that wise words still stuck in my minds as I read the 8th Habit of Highly Effective People written by Stephen R.Covey. I don’t know how to explain in the most intelligent, elegan, and precious words other that the former words in my first sentences.
This night when I wake up earlier than before, I intended to read some of my book. Remembering of how self development was an important issue of my life, I choose to read this book. This is not the first time I’ve read it, but it still have a great invention to me in every pieces of its words.
I would like to share to all of you despite of my shallow comprehension of its meaning. These following sentences I write were the most enchanting words for me that night.
“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”
Intellectually, as the writer of this book, I also had learn from many sources about our freedom to choose our response to whatever happens to us but that night I had noticed that the space is largely determined by our genetic or biological inheritance and present circumstances. Those three sentences will be explained by the following paragraph written by the author.
“ many who have grown ups with unconditional love in supportive circumstances, the space may be very large. With others, due to various genetic and environmental influences, it may be very small. But the key point is there is still a space there and it is in the use of that space that the opportunity to enlarge exists. Some with a very large space, when facing adverse circumstances, may choose to cave in, thereby reducing the space between stimulus and response. Others with smaller space may swim upstream against powerful genetic, social, and cultural currents and find their freedom expanding, their growth accelerating and their happiness deepening. The former simply do not open this most priceless of all birthday gifts. Gradually, they become a function more of their conditions than their decisions. The latter, perhaps stumblingly and with great, sustained effort, open this priceless gift of freedom to choose and discover the force that releases almost all of the other gifts given at birth.”
I wish those enchanting words come from my words someday as I found that it is very relieving every time I read it. For you all who want to listen to the meaning in shorter way, and to show you that a failure to notice this space would kills our ability to change, I had captured and willing to share it:
“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change, until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds”
