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Hope and Responsibility
Positivity isn’t the same as ignorance
Lately, I’ve been seeing some stories on Medium, and elsewhere, that the world isn’t as bad — we need to just focus on ourselves, laugh, and love. I published something similar just the other day. Then I thought: Yes, and…
Our planet and nature are truly in peril at the moment. There truly are a lot of things we can prevent. Pollution, habitat loss, extinction, harming living creatures — being some of them. Though yes we need to learn how to focus on ourselves and laugh, we also need to accept our power in making changes, and not pretend that nothing is happening.
Two concepts we all use differently — here are my definitions:
Hope — the power that lights our path to keep us going and ties us to our human-ness.
Responsibility — the power to use our hope in a powerful context.
For the majority of us, the word responsibility has a negative meaning. We associate it with blame, fault, and guilt rather than choice, action, and empowerment.
When we keep our thoughts hopeful and look at responsibility as our choice and actions we end up empowered to make smart and good choices. Our knowledge gives us responsibility — after all, if we know, and don’t use it, how does that make us any different…
