Clear Definitions #2: Responsibility
Where does responsibility come from?
It comes from the same place as authority.
It starts like this. You feel a need. You have an idea of how to meet the need. You take the first step towards meeting that need… you take the initiative. In that moment, you’ve made something invisible, visible. We feel needs all the time. We have ideas all the time. No one need ever know anything about them. But when you feel a need, translate it into an idea and then commit to that idea by taking the first step of making it real, in that moment what is inside us starts to be revealed to the world.
“What are you cooking? What are you drawing? Where are you going?”
We have to ask, because we don’t know. When we see someone cooking or drawing or going somewhere, we can only see a little slice. That particular moment in the process of putting some unseen need being met, of someone unseen idea being realised.
The person who is walking/drawing/cooking, on the other hand, has already seen the ending in their mind. They might even have played it out a thousand times before actually taking the step to put it into action. They have the whole picture. We only see the surface.
So, if I’m cooking my well-practised, signature, get-out-of-the-kitchen-i-know-what-I’m-doing courgette lasagne, then you might walk in and see me grating a block of manchego the size of your head and have an opinion about it. And that’s fine. But you don’t know what I’m doing. You can’t see from where you are where I’m going to. As the instigator, the author, the source of this particular culinary meisterwerk, only I know. Only I can say what is in and what is out. If there are questions about this lasagne, only I know the answers. Only I can respond. And — as such — that makes it my responsibility.
Both authority and responsibility arise in the same moment — in that moment where some inner vision meets the world in a concrete action. Authority and responsibility are twins — born in the moment when we take the initiative.
I have authority over the thing I am authoring (in this case, a lasagne). As the author, I hold the vision. And I have a responsibility to that vision: to articulate and to act on that vision. Because no one else can. Authority and responsibility are the same size. I have responsibility for what I have authority for. I have authority for what I have responsibility for. Without responsibility, there is no authority.
So, responsibility means being the one who is able to respond.
“You don´t understand even the meaning of the word responsibility. The society has been so cunning. It has destroyed our most beautiful words, given them distorted meanings. Ordinarily in your dictionaries “responsibility” means duty, doing things the way you are expected to do them by your parents, by your teachers, by your priests, by your politicians, by somebody else.
Your responsibility is to fulfill the demands made upon you by your elders and your society. If you act accordingly, you are a responsible person; if you act on your own ― individually ― then you are an irresponsible person. And your fear is: in acting spontaneously, here and now, there is a danger ― you may start acting individually. What will happen to your responsibility?
The fact is that “responsibility”, the very word, has to be broken into two words. It means “response ability”. And response is possible only if you are spontaneous, here and now. Response means that your attention, your awareness, your consciousness, is totally here and now, in the present. So whatever happens, you respond with your whole being. It is not a question of being in tune with somebody else, some holy scripture, or some holy idiot. It simply means to be in tune with the present moment.
This ability to respond is responsibility.”
Read more about how to be clear. Or get in touch.
www.charlesdavies.com
