Everything you have in life can be taken from you except 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.

— Viktor Frankl

With rising levels of fear that seem to be all around us now — in the news, on the Internet, and in daily life — perhaps you’ve had opportunities such as I’ve had lately to choose clarity over chaos. In recent years, I’ve been more concerned about taking care of family members with health concerns than I have with any health challenges of my own, so when something came up for me recently, I found myself searching for clarity about what was going on.

Because the human mind is the ultimate tool of creation, we can develop story after story and create journey after journey, going deep into fear if we like. Or we can breathe, get centered, and feel love as we take the next steps toward clarity. When we are in fear, there is no clarity. There is only grappling and wondering and getting so scared that we don’t know what to do, creating scenarios in our minds with the worst possibilities that weren’t there in the first place. And this can be with anything — not just heath concerns, but also financial frustrations, life-changing decisions, cyber-hacking threats, or any sort of fear. Those are all fear leading us into chaos.