Ruth came back and allowed as how she could listen and think about what we said. She didn't really think she could change, most of us don't, but she'd listened. I talked to her about choice not change, and she liked that. She also liked the idea of grade-free learning, and that my job was to support her and nurture her as she was not as she felt she should be. We agreed that being herself was a not a disability, and she had used her mental energy and agility effectively all her life when she looked at her past in a new way. Her survival had depended entirely on her intelligence and learning ability however they presented themselves and not on how she looked. She began to see that computers are fast and look smart but a really quite dumb, as binary dumb as a light switch just in the billions of switches, and her fear diminished. She chose to see the computer not as an alien and superior but as a three-year old named Fred, and she began to love the little beast for what it was. It was not what she chose to fear. She chose to say "Yes" to her ability to deal with it. Ruth chose to believe in her learning and her ongoing ability to learn. As time went on, she made many choices and each of these strengthened other choices. In the process, she questioned many meaning perspective that limited her, and they transformed into open and opening perspectives. Eventually, she found that other people asked her for help on their computers, and she could, as we had learned to practice, figure out many solutions. Ruth retold her story, recognized her heroic role in that story, and began to feel joy in her becoming self far more that the defective identity and ego she constructed as part of her survival in the very hard and unforgiving world in which she had lived.
Ruth showed enormous agility and ambition as she went on, and she managed a grace in choice that many struggled with. She found the "Yes" in seeing her new choices as a joy and liberation in her present life and not a condemnation of her past. She felt happy to know what she had found out. She didn't condemn herself for not knowing what she hadn't known or had any reason or motivation to know. Ruth allowed the "No" she felt toward the past fade away and began to see that past as a wonderful repository or library of experiences. This happened more and more as she freed herself from the meaning perspectives that had limited her vision and understanding of those experiences. When she re-visioned herself and her heroic role in her past, the success of her past, she could release her anger and abandon feeling apologetic about what happened to her and the choices she made in the past. She could and did take pride in her new choices and ultimate results. Ruth discovered she could return more fully to the working definition of the becoming self, of her becoming self:
The self exists as a conscious, independent entity which perceives the world, takes information from that perception, learns from that information, makes choices based on that learning, and acts freely on those choices. The self experiences the results of those choices, accepts the responsibility of those choices and results, and the process begins again.
Essential in all of these choices was a primary questioning of the anger she and we can hold onto about the present or the past. Just knowing we have a choice about anger, we can give it up and let it simply go away, choose that as a response to situations in the past and present that motivated us to choose anger. Many people deny anger in its immediacy is a choice at all. That may be, but only at the immediacy of the moment of the shock or trauma that brought it on. As soon as that settles, we can choose to let the anger go. It comes hard for many of us to accept the fact that we really can choose how we respond to any situation ever if we can't change the situation
In class, we worked out this simple and striking hypothetical example of this idea of freely choosing our response to the unfair and unchangeable. Many who heard about Frankl and the concentration camp felt impressed, but his story felt a little remote even abstract to them. That's how we came to this more immediate and tangible illustration.
Imagine a person has been hit by a car through no fault of her/his own. Given the severity of the injuries, the doctor amputates a leg of this person. The person had no any ability to choose to grow a new leg or keep the one already amputated. This person can, must, and will choose how she/he will respond to this physical mutilation. That person can, and many do, choose to stay angry for the rest of her/his life. None of us could see how that would compensate for the loss of a leg. In fact, we all saw that such a choice would limit the life of that person. Indeed, such a choice would form a meaning perspective on which that person remained transfixed, stuck endlessly in loss with no chance to find liberation into a freer life. If this person chooses to come to a balance with this injury, that person will go on and live life fully, leg or no leg: unfair and unchangeable on one level, and changeable in result on another. It's a choice.
A friend found the power of choice remarkably true with a graduate student of hers. She always opened her classes in every way to student participation, presentation, group and individual discussions. One student showed his dislike for everything anyone said and everyone who spoke. No one wanted to work with him, and the class was settling down into a kind of uneasy silence overshadowed by this angry student. My friend and I spoke about choice, and she presented the idea of choice to this student. His first choice was anger. Did my friend think that he chose all the terrible things that happened to him? He listed the sadnesses of his life which were indeed substantial and lamentable. She answered that he still had a choice in how he responded to all of this. He left hurriedly, and she had no idea how he would react in their next class. In that class, he watched her most of the time, and he let the class talk without his disquieting interruptions. The next class, he spoke well, listened to others, and generally contributed to a productive and happy classroom. By the next class, everyone wanted to work with him, and the class came completely alive. He told my friend that that he decided to try to choose to let the anger go and take his life as he found it. His life got better for him at least as far as she could see in that classroom.