"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Viktor Frankl · 1905–1997 · Vienna
Frankl wrote this not from a lecture hall but from the slow recovery after Auschwitz, where he had watched men with nothing in common save a single capacity: the refusal to let the camp choose their reaction for them. He called it the last of the human freedoms, the one no circumstance can take. The line above became the founding sentence of logotherapy, the school of psychology built on the conviction that meaning is a choice made in that small interval, not a feeling that arrives.
The next time you feel reaction rising, to a message, a comment, a delay, name the gap aloud. "Here is the space." Then breathe once before you respond. Practice the gap. The freedom is in noticing it.