books
The Choice

The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger is not a new release; it was published in 2017, and yet it has just now come across my desk, a couple of times. Ordinarily I do not love self-help books, so I resisted. And then I read these words, “This book has changed my life.” That may have come from Oprah, and what a powerful statement. I caved.

Within the first chapters, I knew immediately that The Choice is much more than a self-help book like I had originally presumed; it’s a memoir, the excruciating story of a Holocaust survivor and the choice she makes not only to survive, but to use her experience to lovingly help others heal, and in writing this book, to help its readers as well.

The Choice is a journey, and for much of it, the description and detail are so vivid and clear, I felt like I was right beside Dr. Eger in Auschwitz, in America, and in the trenches of her office with her patients. Eger beautifully and honestly shares her own path to freedom from an imprisonment that is both physical and psychological.

“I know that the biggest prison is in your own mind and in your pocket, you already hold the key: the willingness to take absolute responsibility for your life; the willingness to risk; the willingness to release yourself from judgement and reclaim your innocence, accepting and loving yourself for who you really are - human, imperfect, and whole,” she tells a room of soldiers who had just returned from Afghanistan.

And although the horrors that Eger has survived are great, she never belittles the suffering of others. In fact, she validates - life is hard. But she shows us that there is a path through to a better place found beyond the bars of a cell, and she humbly models for us how to get there.

“We have the capacity to hate and the capacity to love. Which one we reach for,” she writes, “is up to us.”

And that for me is the beautiful message of this formidable book. We have a choice, and no matter what we carry with us from our past or what we are enduring in the current day, we can make that choice, and that will truly make all the difference.