evidence: No space. No choosing a response. Hell, not even the parentheses. Just responding in a way that led to more stacked stimuli and responses. There was very little growth and very little freedom. [...] For me, the gift and superpower of sobriety is being able to pry open that space. Over the years, the parentheses between stimulus and response slowly came into focus. It looked a little like this: S()R. [...] *P.S. Very tricky attribution on the stimulus/response quote. It’s often attributed to Stephen Covey, but he’s on the record explaining that he read it in a book while on vacation in Hawaii and was not able to find the book or attribution again. It’s very in line with Viktor Frankl’s work, but it’s not verbatim in any of his published books. It’s possibly Rollo May or B.F. Skinner. No one knows for sure, but I’m going with Viktor Frankl.