Robert Greene, in The Laws of Human Nature, tells a story about Anton Chekhov that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
Chekhov had a miserable childhood. His father was physically and verbally abusive. Anton and his siblings grew up in a household defined by fear and resentment. When the family fell into financial ruin, everyone except Anton left for Moscow. He stayed behind to finish his diploma, taking up tutoring on the side to earn money.
Something shifted during that time alone. Free from his father’s voice, he slowly realized he wasn’t useless. He had worth. Confidence, tentative at first, began to build.
As he examined his own thinking, he came to a realization – he had the freedom to choose his attitude. He thought about his father differently. Not just as the man who had hurt him, but as someone shaped by generations before him, by his own suffering, his own inheritance of pain. That shift in perspective allowed Chekhov to see his father as a victim rather than a tyrant. And from there, remarkably, came forgiveness. And eventually, unconditional love.
That freedom – to choose how to respond to what life dealt him – is what drove Chekhov to Moscow. His family all lived together in a single room in a red-light district. The conditions were as adverse as they come. And yet every time despair crept in, Chekhov reached for perspective. He understood something that’s easy to know intellectually but hard to actually live – that you can’t always choose your circumstances, but you can choose your response to them.
Over time, he turned his family’s fortunes around, not just financially but emotionally. He became the person holding everyone else up.
And it didn’t stop there. Even as he grew in stature as a writer and playwright. Even as tuberculosis slowly took hold of him. People who met Chekhov in his final years remarked on the calm he carried. He had, in some way, found freedom even from death itself.
Agency (or the ability to be proactive) is one of the most powerful freedoms available to us.
Maybe the most powerful one of all.
A Learning a Day 