When we choose to make unconditional positive regard an essential quality and principle for us to adopt as part of our lives, we also form a familial relationship with the moral sphere and the ends principle. Those principles become part of the choices we make in the situations and suffering in which we find ourselves.[148] I find in Frankl suggestions for the pattern in which we can enact the principles of the "Yes" attitude to life.[149]
In all we have discussed in the section on Compassionate Communication, we assume an attitude toward language in relation to how we treat others. That choice of attitude becomes active and effective in how we choose to act on that attitude. Attitude needs to become action. We will want to make choices based on that attitude, that principle, so that it takes on meaning and becomes part of our quest of aspiration, the existential search for our becoming self. The action we take puts us in the way of experience and encounter with the world and with others. I offer two examples from my experience in demonstration of how I worked this out as an individual making individual choices based on the broadest base of the principles we discussed. The first deals with a rather mundane encounter with the world which becomes meaningful in attitude and action. The second deals with encounters with others which has become part of the essential meaning of my life and remarkably instrumental in my search for the becoming self.[150]
During a lull in my career as a teacher, I worked as a messenger for a courier service. All day I drove in traffic under the cloud of endless demands for immediate service, a very strict schedule that had to be maintained in the face of constant bad traffic. The whole process offered me a chance to choose tension and stress, and I took that offer very much to heart and body. As we can suppose, our daily levels of stress, our habitual physical posture of tension, may well result from meaning perspectives that inform us to fear our failure through our inadequacy. When we rush to get somewhere on time, we do so in that same sort of fear which heightens that standard level of bodily, and therefore psychological, tension. I got rather deeply involved in that process and feeling and so did Silvia and Gavin when I brought it home. I saw that as an intrusion and a burden in their lives I had no right or reason to impose on them. Looking back, it seems a violation of the ends principle thus outside the moral sphere.
At first, I told myself to stop feeling tension and stress and express that when I got home. "Don't do that" didn't work. My level of stress actually increased because I not only feared my inadequacy as a messenger, I knew I failed at not stopping my tension and stress. That threatened to become a downward spiral that would invite me to choose nightly depression as a response to this situation. Instead, I chose to examine the meaning perspectives behind what I felt and chose. I understood the idea of doing, not "don't do" something, and I chose to change how I physically reacted to the situation to reduce my emotional and psychological response to the situation. I didn't look for the cause of the meaning perspective. I looked for a way to act that would question and make moot that perspective through action itself. We can choose actions as if we didn't feel the meaning perspective that directs us in a very different even stunning way. I did.
I looked at what happened every day that increased my possibilities of stress and tension. In a relatively detached way, I watched a day on the road. Lots of things might upset a day, bad weather conditions or the erratic behavior of other drivers, but the one thing that always happened that made for delays and encouraged my choice of stress came in red lights. The meaning perspective I heard told me desperately to "Hurry up. You're really late. GET GOING." The red lights demanded that I "GET STOPPED!" When I stopped, I increased my tension by rehearsing the meaning perspective of "GET GOING" and its demands. Every light took an inordinately long time to change, and I drove off in anticipation of the next tension filled light. The suspense felt as if it were, quite literally, killing me. I couldn't change my situation. Changing the light color through sheer will seemed doomed to more failure, and ignoring red lights would bring a different and far more dangerous or expensive form of failure. I could, as always make a choice about how I responded to those demon lights. The choice of response found its manifestation through action.
When I got to a red light, instead of sitting there with my foot on the brake and my hand tense around the steering wheel, I put the car into park, took my foot off the brake and my hands off the steering wheel. I relaxed. I took a break as if I had all the time in the world. Everything by way of stress shifted to relaxation and all that tension energy transformed into positive energy to take home with me at the end of the day and share happily with Silvia and Gavin. It got so I looked forward to red lights. Through choice of attitude and action, I turned an hour or so of tension and stress filled delays every day into an hour of paid vacation every day. If my employer knew about that, he might have cut my pay. I said "Yes" to pleasure quite easily as it turned out even as I had failed miserably at saying "No" to tension, stress, and unhappiness. My unquestioned meaning perspective transformed into a conscious awareness attitude about driving into one of calm and ease—when I kept that awareness well in mind. I still keep it in mind and practice it in driving and other aspects of my life. I chose as best I can at the time I chose and later I reflect on the choice and the result.