A Story

During this election season, we have all had to mentally reframe what it would be like if one or the other presidential candidate was elected. It's been a tense time. But as I often do, I lean into a powerful quote by Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl who said, “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.”

Austin Kleon said that when he is anxious, he reads the old masters one of whom is Montaigne, who 400 years ago, wrote in On Prognostications about “the stubborn curiosity of our nature which delights in worrying about the future as if it had not enough to deal with in the present.” He then quotes Lucian: “Let the mind of men be blind to what is to be. May those who fear be permitted to hope.”

Dum spiro spero (while I breathe, I hope).

Thanks for listening.