evidence: Years ago, I might have taken the piling on personally. I might have allowed myself to become overwhelmed, subsumed by the wave of hard things. In such circumstances, it can seem like you have no agency at all, that there’s nothing you can control, that life is happening to you. In difficult moments, I often think back to the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he chronicles his experience in Nazi concentration camps and reflects on what makes life worth living and how humans can preserve independence and spiritual freedom even in the worst circumstances. And what it comes down to is believing in our own agency, recognizing that in every circumstance, if nothing else, we can control how we respond. [...] With all that in mind, today I’m sharing a quote widely attributed to Viktor Frankl and a prompt inspired by it. [...] Write about the space between stimulus and response. Write about a time you recognized it—or you didn’t—and how that impacted your life.