Taking Responsibility

It does not mean guilt. That much I know. It is not apologizing for things. It is not about feeling bad or taking up space with remorse. Taking responsibility means taking whatever happens or happened and turning it into knowledge and experience that I can use. Things happen. Terrible things. Good things. Ordinary things. It is all a picture for me to put together, like puzzle pieces, adding up to make a whole. Yes I am evolving, we all are, even if it doesn’t always look that way. Frustration with where I am has everything to do with a lack of patience, with myself and with others.

Let’s take the gulf and the oil that is gushing up from a hole in the earth that we made, creating a huge black cloud of destruction. At first there was a lot of blaming going on, which is always my first response as a human being, isn’t it? Lets blame BP. Lets blame Obama. Lets blame our neighbor with the big SUV. But unless I am living on an island somewhere eating coconuts, I have to take responsibility as a consumer of oil. Living in LA, I consume a large amount of gasoline just to live. I have to get to the store and so do the trucks that deliver the food there etc. There is no way around being responsible and no point in measuring how much. I am responsible. I cannot blame anyone for the oil spill. My consumption of oil makes me a contributor.

Let me say, thinking this way has changed my thinking about the spill. It is making me do things. It is making me try to reduce my use of the car and that is good. Really good. It is changing my thinking, and that is the important part. I have to change the way I think about everything, not just the car and the oil, but the water I use, the money I spend and on down to every little detail of my life. Taking responsibility, to me, really means being conscious of every choice I make and trying to do the best I can. This includes having patience.

As I think about responsibility, the other piece of it is taking responsibility for my talent. The things I am good at and love to do are my greatest gift to the world. It is my responsibility to get them out there.