One hero does come to mind: Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish girl caught in the middle of the holocaust. While being actively persecuted by the Nazi regime, she was able to achieve much freedom, interior freedom. Ultimately, she was not able to change her circumstances. She like many others was killed at Auschwitz in 1943. But, instead of fighting for the many freedoms taken away from her, she chose to cherish the greatest freedoms which she still had, the ones that no other person could take away. She once wrote in her diary:

"This morning I cycled along the Station Quay enjoying the broad sweep of the sky at the edge of the city, breathing in the fresh, unrationed air. And Everywhere signs barring Jews from the paths and the open country. But above the one narrow path still left to us stretches the sky, intact. They can't do anything to us, they really can't. They can harass us, they can rob us of our material goods, of our freedom of movement, but we ourselves forfeit our greatest assets by our misguided compliance. By our feelings of being persecuted, humiliated, oppressed. By our own hatred....Our greatest injury is one we inflict upon ourselves. I find life beautiful, and I feel free. The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head."

Even in her dire circumstances, Etty realizes that true freedom is something she truly possesses within herself. She carefully notes the difference among many freedoms of movement, goods, etc. The greatest freedom is interior freedom: "I feel free." .

As our own lives progress, many times we feel defeated by those things that we cannot overcome. Health problems take over, the economy goes into recession, our relationships fall apart. Are we able to see past all these outside happenings, and look into the most inner part of our lives? There is a way for us to overcome the burdens placed on us by our circumstances. It involves a mere change of perspective. Just like Etty, we must strive to look at the fact of the matter. The real burdens are not the circumstances themselves, but our reactions to our circumstances.

An event happened to my sister a few years ago. My sister is greatly afraid of giving blood. Whenever she steps into the Blood Testing Clinic, it seems like her veins automatically shrivel up due to fear. This certainly doesn't make it any easier for the nurses to extract blood. Once when she visited the Clinic, she made a bigger fuss than usual, and kept moving each time the nurse brought the syringe close to her arm. Naturally, she ended up being poked more than ten times with a syringe, and only because of her fear of syringes!

This example applies precisely to those anxious, fearful situations. We react in such drastic ways when we are scared, that we end up more hurt and battered than if we just did what we have to do. Our struggles with our hardships cause us a greater burden than the hardship itself does. The anxiety and the fears we feel after losing a job can discourage us from immediately finding another. Not getting the next job adds to the burden, and so on. Each subsequent effort becomes harder. Instead we spend much time thinking and worrying about our current difficult circumstances and our fear of the future.

I highly recommend Etty as our hero for these times of difficulty. Let us follow her example and view the world and ourselves with new eyes. Nothing can really affect us, but ourselves. Our circumstances will change, but we do not have to be changed by them. We can choose to "feel free."