Today is October 2 and Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you realize that you have a choice to either alter the difficulties or alter yourself to meet them?”
People who navigate the chaos know that they cannot often alter life’s difficulties so they decide to alter themselves to meet them. British novelist and short story writer Phyllis Bottome wrote “There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties, or you alter yourself to meet them.”
Bottome was born in Rochester, Kent, the daughter of an American clergyman, Rev. William MacDonald Bottome and an Englishwoman, Mary (Leatham) Bottome.
In 1917, in Paris, she married Alban Ernan Forbes Dennis, a British diplomat working firstly in Marseilles and then in Vienna as Passport Control Officer, a cover for his real role as MI6 Head of Station with responsibility for Austria, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Forbes Dennis died in July 1972 in Brighton.
Bottome studied individual psychology under Alfred Adler while in Vienna. In 1924 she and her husband started a school in Kitzbühel in Austria.
Based on the teaching of languages, the school was intended to be a community, and an educational laboratory to determine how psychology and educational theory could cure the ills of nations. One of their more famous pupils was Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels.
In 1960, Fleming wrote to Bottome, "My life with you both is one of my most cherished memories, and heaven knows where I should be today without Ernan." It has been argued that Fleming took the idea of James Bond from the character Mark Chalmers in Bottome's spy novel The Lifeline.
Bottome altered her life to meet difficulties. Do you?