The Soul's Dominion

I was just surfing the web and ran across the Wikipedia post for Victor Frankl's book The Search for Meaning.  Frankl endured the hardships of the concentration camps, and went on to outline the psychotherapeutic method he called logotherapy.  I have both read the book and visited one of the camps he endured.  In the book Frankl said:
  
“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

Dachau Concentration Camp

He was not the first or last to voice this philosophy.  The Stoics wrote that in the face of difficulty we are responsible for our own response to circumstances, rather than the circumstances themselves.  I'm also reminded of the Serenity Prayer and the desire “to accept the things I cannot change”.  The attitude of the soul is the critical thing here.  Amelia Earhart wrote: 

Courage

Courage is the price that
Life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not knows no release
From little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.

Nor can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul's dominion. Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold resistless day,
And count it fair.

There is a natural tendency to shrink in the face of difficulty.  We would rather take the easy path, but in so doing it may be that we lose ourselves in the dull gray ugliness of meaninglessness.  May we look within ourselves and muster the strength to meet each day, and the courage to overcome the lesser inclinations of the soul.