by Denis Glick
Do you want to have the seat of your choice in a crowded theater? Try this: Go up and down the aisle saying, “If you want to keep your seat, you’ll have to take responsibility.” That should get you a good seat right away.
The belief that responsibility is not our ticket to happiness is widely shared. Look at our culture’s definition of responsibility in a dictionary. From it, a stranger might conclude that being responsible means losing one’s freedom or losing something important.
Yet, you have probably had times in your life when you have decided to be responsible, and you’ve felt less burdened, lighter and happier than before.
So when is responsibility a burden, and when does it cause us to feel lighter, happier and larger than before?
Responsibility is likely to feel like we’re going to lose something whenever we have the belief that someone or something else should be responsible instead of us. It makes sense that if we believe someone or something else should be responsible, we’ll feel resistant to taking that responsibility ourselves. Perhaps we’ll experience that resistance as anger, regret, hurt, depression, or an uphill struggle.
But when we believe it’s entirely appropriate for us to be responsible, and we believe we can do it, responsibility doesn’t seem like we’re swimming upstream, fighting a current. Instead we are likely to feel energized, even excited, as we act.
As it turns out, our dictionary definitions of responsibility aren’t really about responsibility. They are more about what we experience when we are resisting it.
Feel these for a moment: 1. having to be responsible for something in your life. 2. being responsible for something in your life. Which feels freer?
This idea that someone or something else should be responsible could be a belief from our childhood. Parents and other grown- ups take care of us when we are children providing us with support and giving us their attention, and that feels good. Perhaps we’ve believed that if we retain this child’s point of view of wanting attention and support from others when we’re grown up, our adult lives will also feel good.
But an interesting thing happens when we retain a child’s point of view as a grown-up. We must continue to exist as a smaller, more limited being. And as a smaller more limited being, we cut ourselves off from the empowerment that naturally comes with being less limited.
And though it seems like a good idea to have our universe parent us, we soon find out we are not the only child on Earth. It’s likely that the people we love and almost everyone else are doing pretty much the same thing we’re doing. They’re looking to us to sustain their happiness, just as we are depending on them to sustain ours. But it can’t work.
Whenever we are relying on someone or something else to be responsible for our well-being, we are also removing ourselves from our own source of power. We’re simply not capable of sustaining our own lives completely, and so it’s even more difficult when we’re called upon to sustain other people’s lives, as well.
Ironically, the moment we change our point of view and choose to be responsible, we also become less limited, and therefore empowered, to create our own happiness and self-support. We take the burden off other people to sustain us, and it doesn’t feel taxing to give. As we adopt this point of view, our relationships easily shift from the conflicting demands of co-dependencies, to co-creations that are mutually productive and a lot more fun.
Avatar shows us how to make the choice to empower ourselves. Its elegant tools give new meaning to responsibility as we dissolve our resistances to creating our own happiness. Responsibility is no longer something to be avoided. Instead, it looks and feels a lot like our ticket home.
As for a definition of responsibility, consider this:
re.spon.si.bil.i.ty 1. the state, quality, or fact of being responsible. See synonyms at empowerment. 2. something for which one is responsible: a decision to be the source of our experience.Denis Glick Chicago, IL
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