Playing the Game

Responsibility is a crazy thing. It gives you such freedoms and opportunities, but the price is very high. Responsibility is a liberator. If you're responsible for yourself, you have all the power and potential you'll ever need--right inside your hands. Right inside your mind. Right there! You are responsible for your homework, then your gas money, your rent, then your choices and behaviors. We have all kinds of mechanisms that remind of us this freedom. Jail, to start. Spouse. Fines. Children. Rejection. Self-doubt. By being truly responsible, yes, you get to take the credit for your work, but you also bear the load of the consequences.

I remember the first time I appreciated the grave reality of responsibility. I was a little girl, accustomed to directing and bossing and controlling my little brother. To do anything. And he would. Then one evening, I was falling asleep, tucked in, warm and perfectly still. And terribly uncomfortable. I had to go to the bathroom. Really badly. Right now. All of a sudden. And I sucked in air to scream out to David, "Please! Please! Hurry and go to the bathroom for me!" And I realized. Oh no. I'd have to do it myself. For the rest of my life. He couldn't do it for me. No one could. I would have to take time out of my day and  my thoughts and my momentum and go to the bathroom. Everyday, multiple times a day. No one would ever do it for me, no matter how nicely I asked. It was all on my shoulders forever. What a responsibility!

A friend of mine wants to lose weight this 2012. She said to me this morning, "You know. No one can do this but me. No one is to blame but me. And no one can change this but me." That's a great, empowering feeling! I can do it! But, the flip side is, the cost is, no one else can do it, either. It's how I feel about making friends. And keeping them. Do I think they'll land on my doorstep, straight out of a pretty hot air balloon, with intimate knowledge of me and so happy to be my life long confidantes? I much prefer being home with my family and reading a book or watching football, but that is not going to get me any friends, just like eating nachos won't take inches off my waist. Doesn't work, I've tried.

Without the responsibility, though, (I try to teach my boys) that we'd then have no control at all. If it wasn't your "fault" you failed the test, if it was the teacher's or the classroom's or the friend next to you or your dog or the weather or the whatEVER, then how will you guarantee you won't fail it again? How will you learn from this and adjust your pattern? If everything always happens to you, you must suffer a terrible feeling all the time! That sounds awful to me, to really believe my life is up to others' whims and influences on it than my own fallible mind and self.  Isn't it better to be the keeper of that ability (as broken and imperfect and short it may be) than to be the perpetual victim of life's circumstances?

"I am working on a project that needs some tweaking." No one can do it but me. I hope to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when I finish. There's nothing worse than the feeling of chucking that horseshoe towards the pin and hearing it thud into the grass, feet and angles away from the target staring you in the face. That is not the feeling I'm aiming for, but at least I'm the one aiming.