When I think of Hamlet's procrastination to avenge his father's death, I wonder what self-help we could offer him today - or what my mother would say to him when he says:
"Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison."
When I was eighteen my mother gave me another book, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, I was stubborn and didn't read it until one year for a senior seminar course I had to teach it. An incredible story, ranked one of the most inspirational works of all-time, Frankl endures the horror of the Nazi death camps and lives to tell the tale. His purpose was to survive and find meaning in the bleakest of situations that we cannot even imagine, yet Frankl's story comes close, so that we may learn from his experience. His goal that such atrocities never occur again.
The lasting lesson that I return to again and again, especially at the low points in life:
“Everything can be taken 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 E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
It's a choice. If you think you're life is a prison, it is.
Or like Hamlet:
O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space...
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