Some words become emotionally charged to the extent that it restricts, or even distorts their meaning, and the way we hear them. Responsibility is one such word. It has come to carry an extraordinary baggage.
- It has become part of a blame culture; when anything bad happens it is assumed that someone (more likely someone than something) is responsible.
- It has become part of a victim culture; when anything bad happens it is assumed that someone else is responsible. Therefore I can remain innocent; a victim.
- As a result it has been associated with guilt.
- Even where an action is not necessarily bad, responsibility has come to feel like a burden. Where some action is required responsibility to accomplish it has become something we would rather place upon someone else.
And yet, perhaps there is another way of using this word; a way that is not weighed down with blame, victimhood, guilt, or burden.
Response-Ability
If you break the word up into its two constituent parts, it becomes Response-Ability … the ability to respond.
Looked at like this it speaks of a different reality, and it becomes; freedom, rather than burden; empowerment, rather than, victimhood; and future orientated possibility, rather than backward looking blame & guilt.
It looks at reality – which is often full of difficult events and circumstances – and rather than asking the question ‘why?’, it asks ‘What?’; what should I do? It reveals the reality that, whatever the circumstances, every one of us has the ability to respond. Every one of us does respond – that’s one of the definitions of Life, that we respond to the changing stimuli of the world. But as human beings we have a gift that is not so evident on other forms of life; we have far more control over the way we respond – we can chose.
However constrained our life we have the ability to respond in a way we can chose. Even if we are physically constrained, we have control over our emotional and thinking response. That does not mean that our response-ability can always make the situation better, but the wrong response can always make it worse. So, responsibility is a precious freedom.
What would our life be like if we reclaimed responsibility in this way?