Brian Draper considers the quality of our choices in life

Brian Draper

Last week, shamefully, I shouted at an old lady. This is my confession.

My kids had seen a fountain and a shallow pool in a grand and leafy square within a former army barracks (close to home) which now houses retired people.

It was a sunny morning and we were walking back from church. We stopped at the fountain, and my wife and I - usually far more vigilant - were lost in conversation. Suddenly, this lady was storming across the courtyard, arms waving madly at the children - who'd been lobbing a few small stones into the pool, as kids do.

"Don't you know those stones block the filters?" she shouted at them scarily, her words shattering the tranquility. My wife was impressively calm. "We are so sorry. We hadn't seen they were throwing stones. Please forgive us. We'll go now and won't do it again."

Meanwhile, memories for me of being scolded by similarly joyless adults as a child began to well; on top of which, she didn't accept the apology. "People like you make this a miserable place to live in," she continued, as swallows skimmed the water and the light glistened magically from its surface.

That was it: my anger sprang like the fountain. I'd had enough, and I returned her verbal fire, with interest. And as this wounded lady turned and walked away, I shouted at her back, "Why don't you just put a smile on your face?"

"Between stimulus and response there is a space", concluded Viktor Frankl, the neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, when recounting the way some rare souls responded calmly in the face of incomparable provocation in Auschwitz. "In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

It was the 100th anniversary that day of (what was effectively) the opening shot of the First World War, fired by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo - and outside an adjacent army museum in the barracks, they'd set up a display of guns and uniforms. Sometimes it feels impossible to make a link between the banality of our own lives and the extraordinary action we witness on the stage of world history. Yet as I walked by, seething, I remembered: every human heart can be a theatre of war. There is stimulus, and response. And a space in between, in which to make a choice. With God's help. With God's help.