A little less conversation..

It is time to live as responsible human beings. As individuals, as well as a race. 

The word responsible has a bad reputation, we often group it in with the ‘negative’ words. To be responsible is to be boring, square, not exciting and uncool. But what is responsibility really? Accountability for your behaviour. Taking ownership of the actions and words you put out into the world. 

We are all a part of the world we see around us. We dream of making a real impact, of being the next greatest wave without realising that every little thing we do has a ripple. Its no easy feat, to be truly accountable and responsible and it can appear restricting, as if there would be so many rules, where in fact, quite the opposite is true. There is freedom with accountability, because if I know exactly what I’m doing, I can do anything. If I remain 100% responsible for myself, I free myself of being actively responsible for anything or anyone else. 

Imagine walking down the street and you stumble upon a piece of rubbish. You know that rubbish shouldn’t be on the street, you know we have rubbish bins for that. We have agreed as a society that rubbish goes in the bins, the bins are collected and disposed of in landfills (a system that desperately needs rethinking but for the purposes of this example please go with it). In my view of full personal responsibility, you are responsible now to make a choice. To understand that picking up the rubbish is a choice, but leaving it is also a choice. You didn’t throw it, its not your job to pick it up (and we have jobs for that) but you’ve seen it. Personal responsibility to me, isn’t about doing the ‘right’ thing, which is mostly subjective. It is about knowing exactly what you are doing and why you are doing it. It is about being conscious of all the little decisions and choices we are making everyday that usually go under the radar, that we don’t even realise we are choosing. Its about having an internal moral compass, understanding that compass and letting it guide you. 

It takes work, to focus continuously on staying present. So many of us are not even aware of how much of our lives are lived on autopilot. We think we are in control of our lives, that we choose what we do. Most of how we behave - our choices - is just learned patterns that we repeat in different settings. It’s not a bad thing that we do, its just how our brains work. We want to survive, that is our number one driving factor. If we are comfortable our minds won’t ask for more - which a lot of people interpret as lazy, or a lack of motivation - and if we are uncomfortable our brains will try and get us away from that discomfort. Learning these patterns for yourself - what your brains does - is what personal responsibility means to me. This is how we learn to not project outwards or hide inwards to make ourselves feel safe, we are able to see situations with a more neutral perspective.

Practicing this on yourself will also develop an enormous amount of compassionate because without compassionate I don’t think its possible to look that deeply into yourself. Its not pretty or pleasant to see all of yourself and you must learn to be patient, forgiving and understanding towards yourself. How you treat yourself is how you treat others, this is why self love, self acceptance, self respect - and all the self nouns - are so important. However you treat the world and others is how you learned to feel about yourself. Heal that, and you’ll be amazed how kind and wise you can become. 

I have been preaching about personal responsibility for years, and I wouldn’t even claim to have fully reached or understood it. I still hear myself in my minds chatter, blaming others, excusing my own behaviours, allowing certain situations to continue. As I said, its no easy feat. I can say it is a belief of mine - as much as I believe in anything - but the subject of belief will have to wait for another piece. It is something I hold in high regard and as the first step and most important  component of living a happy, peaceful, fruitful and balanced life. Isn’t that what we all want? 

To be responsible is to concentrate on what the truth is in front of you, continuously and consciously. The hard part, is we are not even aware when we are not doing it. We think we see a situation, we understand what is happening, but if we are only seeing our side, then we cannot be seeing reality. An old friend of mine once said to me, just like there are really three sides to every coin (heads, tails and the width of the coin) there are always at least three sides to every argument, my side, your side and the objective truth, of which there can be many sides. The process of being a responsible individual is long, worth it and above all necessary for the future of our race here on Earth. It begins with awareness of oneself, clarity over impulse, fear and desire. From this clarity and understanding, you can gain power over yourself by recognising patterns in behaviour and their effect on the environment around you. When I speak about having an effect on the environment, I mean the area in which one lives. The physical, mental and emotional area. We affect things on all levels, and this ability in all living things is where the magic of the universe lies. 

This is where we get to step into what we truly love and value. Where we get to create it.