Today is a day that we celebrate life’s freedom with gratitude. I have a very long list of life’s freedoms for which I am grateful. Topping that list is my ability to make choices.

And we always can make a choice…always!

Dr. Viktor Frankl, one of my greatest mentors, was a brilliant psychiatrist captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in a series of concentration camps. His notes of his work and all of his possessions were seized. Stripped of everything, literally and figuratively, he was given a number to replace his name. “The experience of camp life shows that man does have a choice of action,” Frankl stated in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.” Dr. Frankl realized this truth when he wrote, “What alone remains is ‘the last of human freedoms’—the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”

Those are very wise and applicable words then, and today. When we place ourselves in a victim role, we are victims. We do create our own realities. However, we have a choice in how that reality looks, as co-creators. We can choose to create a different perception, a different reality.

Let freedom ring!