The part of you that is still here
I remember a Friday night a few years back, when my oldest son was four. I was sitting on the floor of my kitchen because the couch felt too far away. Nothing dramatic had happened that day in particular. It was just the accumulation of everything up to that point — the kind of tired that isn’t about sleep. I didn’t get up for almost twenty minutes. I’m telling you this first because if you’re reading this on a day like that one, I don’t want to open with a quote and pretend I’m above it. I’m not. I just found a sentence, a while later, that gave me somewhere to put my hands.
Today’s Words
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our growth and our freedom lies our response.
— Widely attributed to Viktor Frankl · Austria · 20th century
I say “widely attributed” on purpose. Frankl scholars have never been able to locate this exact line in his published writing, even though it circulates everywhere under his name. It may be a paraphrase someone else wrote and credited to him decades later. I bring this up not to undercut the quote, but because I think it matters — the idea is Frankl’s, even if the tidy wording isn’t. And honestly, once you know that, the sentence feels a little more human. Less like scripture, more like something someone scribbled after reading him closely enough to get it right.
A life built from the worst possible material
Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna before the war. He lost his wife, his mother, and his brother in the camps. He spent close to three years moving between Auschwitz and several other camps, most of that time not knowing if he’d see the next winter. When he was finally freed, there wasn’t much waiting for him — his family gone, his early manuscript confiscated and destroyed. He rewrote the core of it from memory in the following weeks. That became Man’s Search for Meaning.
What strikes me isn’t just that he survived. It’s that the idea at the center of his work — that something in a person can stay untouched even when everything external is stripped away — wasn’t a theory he arrived at from a desk. He tested it against the worst conditions a human being can be put through, and it held.
The gap nobody warned you about
I sat with these words for longer than I expected to, mostly because the opening line seemed too simple, and it took me a while to truly understand what it meant.
And the moment it clicked, it hit me hard. Most of the time, pain doesn’t feel like it has a gap in it at all. Someone says the kind of thing that guts you, or the test results come back wrong, or the phone call you were dreading finally happens — and the reaction is instant, like the hurt and the falling apart are the exact same thing.
Frankl isn’t arguing with that feeling. He’s not telling you the gap is wide, or that you should be able to find it easily, or that finding it will make the pain smaller. He’s just saying it’s there. Sometimes it’s the width of a single breath. On a bad week, it might be smaller than that — barely a flicker between the blow landing and you reacting to it. But even a flicker is something, because it means you weren’t fully absorbed into the event. A part of you was still standing just outside it, watching.
I think that’s the part people are actually grieving when they say “I don’t feel like myself anymore.” Not that the self is gone. That it’s gotten very hard to locate.
What I do with this on the hard days
I’m not going to pretend I read this quote and suddenly handled things better. What actually happened was smaller and slower. I started noticing, maybe once a day, one moment where I hadn’t reacted the way the old pattern would have predicted. Not a big moment. Once it was just not snapping at my sister on the phone when I normally would have. That’s it. That’s the whole example.
Frankl called this inner space “the last of the human freedoms,” and he meant it literally — he’d watched people in the camps lose everything else and still retain some sliver of how they met their own suffering. I’m careful not to compare my ordinary bad days to that. It would be disrespectful to the scale of what he survived. But I think that’s exactly why the idea travels so well into smaller griefs. If the space held under those conditions, it’s reasonable to believe it’s still there under milder ones, even on the days you can’t feel it.
There’s no schedule for this
Some days aren’t for insight. Some days you just get through them, and that’s the whole task, and it’s enough.
The quote doesn’t ask anything of you today. It just says the space exists, whether or not you can locate it this week. It was there yesterday. It’ll still be there next month, even if you forget about it in between.
From Japan — tōka, sitting with a candle
A friend in Kyoto told me about this a few years ago — an old, informal habit some households have called tōka, roughly “candlelight sitting.” It’s not a ritual with rules. On a heavy evening, instead of trying to talk yourself out of the feeling, you light one candle and sit near it for a while. No journaling, no meditation app. Just the candle.
I tried it during a rough stretch last winter, more out of curiosity than belief that it would do anything. It didn’t fix the night. But it gave the night a shape it didn’t have before — twenty minutes of just watching a flame move instead of twenty minutes of my thoughts moving. I keep coming back to it, not because it solves anything, but because it’s a small, doable thing on nights when big things aren’t possible.
If tonight is one of those nights for you, that’s where I’d start. Not with the whole book, not with fixing anything. Just the candle, and the space Frankl was talking about, however small it feels right now.
