"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
When something unexpected happens, what is the first thing you habitually do? Is that reaction closer to a choice, or a reflex?
A manuscript sewn into a coat lining, and the last freedom kept in the camps
Viktor Frankl was a Viennese psychiatrist imprisoned in several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, during World War II. He lost his parents and his wife there, yet observed that those who held on to meaning were the ones who endured to the end.
When he was deported, he hid the manuscript of his life's work sewn into the lining of his coat, but it was taken from him. While sick with typhus, he kept himself going by rewriting it on scraps of paper, and after liberation he published the experience as Man's Search for Meaning.