Defy Circumstance

“Everybody has some choice, mother. The poorest girl alive may not be able to choose between being Queen of England or Principal of Newnham; but she can choose between ragpicking and flowerselling, according to her taste. People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.” -Vivie responding to her mother, Mrs. Warren , in the play Mrs. Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw

“Everything can be taken from a man but 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 E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

““A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish.” -Epictetus, Discourses

Speaking of Marie Curie, Billy Oppenheimer wrote this about her in his excellent weekly newsletter…

When she was a teenager, Marie Curie began thinking about pursuing a career as a scientist. But from a poor family in Russia-controlled Poland, the necessary education was beyond her parents’ financial means. So she got up and looked for ways to make the circumstances she wanted. After considering her limited options, Marie struck a deal with her older sister Bronya: Marie would get a job as a governess, using her wages to help Bronya pay for medical school in Paris, on the condition that once Bronya became a doctor, she would in turn help pay for Marie’s education. Beginning in January 1886, Marie worked for a wealthy family in the rural countryside, sixty miles north of her home in Warsaw. She looked after and tutored the family’s children during the day, and in the evenings, she prepared for entrance exams to the Sorbonne, the prestigious university she dreamed of attending. At a time when women were largely excluded from higher education and faced systemic barriers to gaining admission to institutions like the Sorbonne, the challenge was getting to a place where her application was undeniable. “It was indeed an all-powerful instinct,” Marie’s daughter Eve Curie writes in Madame Curie: A Biography, “that made her sit every night at her desk, reading volumes of sociology and physics borrowed from the library, or perfecting her knowledge of mathematics by correspondence with her father…All alone in that country house, she was without direction or advice. She felt her way, almost by sheer chance, through the mazes of the knowledge she wanted to acquire.” After five long, lonely years working as a governess, true to their pact, Bronya became a doctor in Paris and was at last able to fund Marie’s travel, exams, and the next steps toward the circumstances she wanted. “By small imperceptible stages,” Eve writes, “the tragic immobility of the young girl’s existence was beginning to stir.” Despite studying independently without formal instruction, in 1891, Marie received a letter from the admissions offices: “Faculty of Sciences—First Quarter Courses will begin at the Sorbonne on November 3, 1891.” “From that moment,” Eve writes, “Marie’s fortune, starting from zero, began to increase.” She would be one of a small number of women to earn a degree from the Sorbonne, graduating at the top of her class in physics and mathematics, before becoming the first woman in France to earn a PhD in physics—and later, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Don’t be defined by circumstance.

Rather, defy circumstance at every turn.

P.S. – We recently did a Vs. Tuesday Night Zoom Reading of the play Pierre And Marie by Ron Clark. It’s a fun and intelligent comedy about the personal and professional lives of Pierre and Marie Curie. You can order the script here.