Response-Ability

We have the responsibility to choose. And we have the ability as well! We can respond or we can react.

And the quality of our life depends on the choice we make.

We know there is a difference between trying to control everything in our life and taking charge of our life. After all, haven’t we tried both?

Trying to control our lives sets us up for failure and causes unnecessary pain and suffering. Taking charge of our lives means owning our lives, having (and using!) our ability to respond rather than react.

As wise individuals, we can take responsibility for ourselves and admit that “I might not be in control of what happens to me in life but I am in charge of how I respond to it.”

Sometimes stuff happens that we cannot control at all: deaths, disease, accidents, other people’s issues. But we do have the ability to choose how we respond and what meaning we assign to these events.

Was the cancer experience good or bad? If it made me start paying attention to my health and enhanced my relationships with family and friends, who would say it was a bad thing?

Response-ability is our ability to respond (or not respond) to any situation and can dramatically affect our happiness.

We can ignore a nasty comment. We can choose not to respond to other people’s dramas and problems. We can choose not to respond to marketing tactics, sensationalism in the news.

If a happy person finds themselves in a traffic jam, they can put a motivational tape in and be thankful for the extra time to learn or just sing along to a lively piece of music. Meanwhile an unhappy person yelling at the guy that is in the car in front of him is responding to the event in a way that continues their unhappiness.

How about we all just decide to..?

(Did we know being responsible could be easier and more fun when we choose to use our response-ability?)

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