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Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl is a powerful book that provides profound insights about life and the human condition. Here are some of the key learnings:

I recently came across a beautiful Buddhist teaching: The Two Arrows. The Buddha once asked his student, "If a person is struck by an arrow, is it painful?" The student nodded, yes. The Buddha then asked, "If a person is struck by a second arrow, is that even more painful?" The student again nodded, yes. The Buddha then explained, "In life, we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional." The first arrow is the negative event that hits our lives. This is the uncontrollable chaos that we may find ourselves thrown into from time to time. The first arrow is impossible to avoid. It hits and it hurts. The second arrow is governed by our response to the first—and as the parable teaches us, being struck by the second arrow is entirely within our control. Our reaction and response controls the direction and force of the second arrow: • If we attach ourselves to the pain of the first arrow, continue to think all of the negative thoughts it brought about, repeat the patterns of our past, dwell in the pain, and bemoan our bad luck, we send the second arrow hurtling straight into our open wound. • If we pause, breathe, give ourselves a moment to reset, and choose a balanced response, we send the second arrow falling feebly to the ground. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian philosopher and Holocaust survivor renowned for his contributions to existential psychology, has a brilliant framing for this: "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response." Our power is in the space that we can create between stimulus and response. Creating that space is the key to avoiding the second arrow. As Frankl famously 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.” So the next time you encounter an uncontrollable negative event in your life—when you're struck by that painful first arrow—consider the parable of the two arrows. The first arrow may have hurt, but the second arrow is always optional.