It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
We never get to choose all the situations that confront us on a daily basis. But we always have the opportunity to decide how we react.
Buddhists say that free will exists in the window of space between stimulus and reaction. For only in that period of time can we truly evaluate the encounter and choose how we should respond.
This idea of reaction and response may sound trite. It may sound cliche. It may sound totally unimportant. But I agree that right there, somewhere in between those two, there rests the key. Free will. I found this little gem myself when I was young. Not that it changed my life, but rather allowed me to change it, and in it I found myself, right there when I realized I could.
Though I must admit, everytime my cursor slips off the scroll button as I scan down a thread and hits on the Deny Ignorance link and it pops up on my screen and my eyes go cross eyed and my brain freezes for a moment and I want to shout aposrgl mkcsa;roigaxlva;lskh;lakj, I take a breath, click it off, go back to the thread and get on with life. Ah me.
Not that it changed my life, but rather allowed me to change it, and in it I found myself, right there when I realized I could.