"There is freedom in taking responsibility for one's own life"........

 

I was once told by a wise man: "There is freedom in taking responsibility for one's own life".

When I first heard those words, a number of retorts instantly surfaced and there seemed to be no end to the "but's": "but I am not responsible for what other people say, do, or how they treat me, or what happens, etc. etc.".

Then driving home late one night from a gig (music), I suddenly got it and I

 felt as if a massive burden fell off my shoulders.

Many of us have probably had times in our lives when life seemed so complicated, and so difficult, and so confusing, and so painful, that we wished someone would just appear and rescue us from all our troubles. In the Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt, we find the earliest evidence of the human quest for "salvation", to be "rescued", to be "saved". Of course, in those days, staying alive and well was far more challenging than it is for most of us today. Today we have tools that we can use to predict and analyse a great many things with, and this helps us to make and take preventative precautions, anticipate what may happen in the future theoretically and even practically, we can do modelling, we can create virtual realities, but, the biggest of all issues that every human being have to face: mortality; we all have to face on our own, and at this point in time; our own mortality is not something we can be "rescued" from.

Some of us perhaps feel inclined to want to "fix"  or "rescue" things, ourselves, other people, and situations, and some of us perhaps feel inclined to assign blame and often feel as if we are "victims".

(I am using the term "victim" here for lack of a better word. Put another way: some of us see a problem and ask ourselves what we have to do to fix it, some of us see a problem and ask others what they are going to do to fix it, although some of us perhaps swing between the two.)

Victor Frankl, Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist, and also a Holocaust survivor, writes in his book "Man's search for meaning": "Those who came to the camp and kept asking "why is this happening to me" hardly ever survived more than a few weeks,..... I realised that those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."

Many of us have probably asked that question: "Why is this happening to me?" and quietly wished that someone would swoop in and rescue us. For some of us, when we were children, often our first heroes and rescuers were our parents/caregivers. When we had a bad dream, when we scrubbed our knees, when a friend let us down, when our first love dumped us, our "heroes" would come to our rescue and comfort us. If, on the other hand, we had parents/caregivers who did not come to our rescue, rather, we had to learn to fight our own battles from a very young age, and for many of us, this often forced us to find our heroes/rescuers within ourselves.

"There is freedom in taking responsibility for one's own life".

So what kind of responsibility am I talking about?

I guess that my interpretation is this: the actions and decisions that I make, I hold myself accountable for, as well as the outcomes that are results of those actions and decisions.

How does this relate to "freedom"?

If I am not responsible for my life, then I have very little say in what happens, things happens to me over which I have very little control; a restrained existence.

Taking ownership and responsibility not only for our actions and decisions, but also for our emotions, I believe we have the freedom to choose how we will respond.

"No, you're wrong there, people can make you angry, upset, sad and so on" you may say.

"Ofcourse I am going feel angry when someone says something insulting."

Victor Frankl: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

Even if someone says something insulting to us, we still have the freedom to choose how we will respond. Yesterday, as I was making an inquiry into the changes the government has made in regards to how to renew a car registration, the assistant spoke to me in shall we say, a very arrogant manner.

As I repeated my question over and over, I could feel my patience waning. ... I perhaps could say that she made me angry, but that would be incorrect, she did not make me angry, I felt angry because my expectations of how I believed she should have spoken to me was not met.

I chose to remain calm. (Then I went out into the car park and vented my anger....hehehe, no, not really)

According to the really smart people, nobody can make us feel bad, angry, sad, etc. ....how we feel is our own choice, our own responsibility.

Which in my view, is good news.

There may be times in our lives when we may need a rescuer, as in; we are flooded and sitting on the roof, a fire is raging around us, our car has broken down, we are being attacked, and so on... but as a coping strategy for life, may I suggest that embracing responsibility and ownership for our own lives, offers so much more.........