Warrior part 2 Responsibility

Warrior part 2 Responsibility

“ability to respond does not mean ability to succeed. There is no guarantee that what you do will yield what you want. The guarantee is that as long as you are alive and conscious, you can respond to your circumstances in pursuit of your happiness. This power to respond is a defining feature of humanity. Our response- ability is a direct expression of our rationality our will, and our freedom. Being human is being response-able. - Fred Kaufman in his book conscious business”

One of the qualities which i believe most clearly defines someone as a warrior is responsibility. Whether they wield a sword or not, true responsibility is core to the warrior mindset. That might seem strange for me to say, you may have been expecting something more like courage, or honour, but responsibility is the one for me. I could understand why this might seem odd, especially in the world we live in especially when responsibility is often misused. Many times when people mean responsibility they mean blame . How often have you head someone say “who is responsible for this?” and known that what they mean is “who can i blame?” However this is not the real meaning of responsibility, it’s real meaning can be found by breaking the word down: Respond- ability. It is to do with the ability to respond consciously to what life offer’s us rather than having a knee- jerk reaction. A wonderful distinction which has helped me to be clearer about this in my own life is made by Fred Kofman in his excellent book ‘Conscious Business’. If i say that responsibility is absolute and unconditional then that can seem like i am trying to say that there are no other factors in your life then your own actions, that if you are faced with terrible circumstances then you only have yourself to blame . The word ‘responsibility’ has become so thoroughly associated with blame it is hard to separate the two any more. The distinction Kofman makes is that we are not responsible for everything we are responsible in the face of everything in our lives. I can’t be held responsible for the weather but i am responsible for my choices in the face of bad weather. On the larger and perhaps less abstract scale, i am not responsible for world hunger. I did not cause it. However , once i know that it is happening i am responsible in the face of it. Whether i campaign, travel to feed people raise money, donate money, donate food do nothing, or actively contribute to the prole by acting in way that will drive up the price of food ( for instance), once i know about the issue i am accountable for my choices- if i am responsible. If i refuse to be responsible ( and that is a choice) then i can pain myself as a helpless victim of circumstance. “I had no choice”

Ironical in the Song of ice and fire series Lord Stark once he reaches Kings landing shows himself to be on of the few in the capitol who is working to act responsibly. Responsibility is about owning the choice you chose rather then denying it even when that is difficult or painful. Sometimes we may ell people we have no choice our of a desire to protect there feelings by even then we engage in a dis- empowering deceit and it our hearts we all know it. I may say “ i am sorry i can’t come to your birthday party,.” but that’s not really true. I may be sorry, especially in the traditional root meaning of the word of “i feel sorrow” but it is not accurate that i can’t come The truth is that i am prioritizing something else. It would be more honest to say “ i would ole to come to your part, and there is something else. that is more important to me that night .” That may be a tougher message by it is more true as well. Perhaps you can see form this example how pervasive the lack of try responsibility is in our daily lives. These may see like trivial things, just some small words but as i say we all the know the truth of this so we are in a constant mode of lying to each other. We habituate our selves to this deceit and over time we even begin to believe it . By these man small lies i convince myself that i real done have a choice. I tell myself the story that i ‘can’t’ go to the party. In this way build and internal dialogue, and through that a preceded reality that is restrictive, limited , and above all, beyond my control. As i have said before, of course there are factors in my life which i don’t have control but what i do when i say i ‘can’t’ instead of ‘ i don’t want to ‘ is put things even more out of my control. I build a cage for myself and then lock myself inside it. This is the worst kind of imprisonment- the one we build for ourselves. Victor frankly, psychiatrist, famous author and founder of logothrapy formed many of the core ideas of this philosophy driven by his experience of being a subject of a concentration camp in \Nazi Germany he talk about how in the concentration camp he realized that while all of his external freedoms had been taken away, the one freedom that the guards could not take form him was his own response to his situation. No matter what they did, they could not control his internal choices and responses to them as human beings. This depth of internal freedom is rare but it is possible for all of us to have access it,, and i would say that we erode this internal freedom by increments every time we say “i can’t” when e mean “ i am choosing something else.”

Just as we erode our relationship with ourselves through these moments where we deny our responsibility, so too we damage our relationships with others . As we look at this matter of responsibility you are probaily sseeing that it takes a very high level of awareness to be truly responsible. It’s tough to notice when you are denying your own capacity to chose, to spot it when you are telling a friend or partner a small, convenient lie, to know and acknowledged when your priorities are different than someone else would like them to be or even to realize when you are acting from an old pattern rather then a live relationship to the world around you . All of this takes a lot of commitment and mindfulness. A wonderful illustration of this is an old story of a great Japanese sword master Tesshu.

“ tesshu had several students studying with him to master the sword. The best of them was walking down the street in the centre of town one day and as he walked past a horse the horse startled and kicked. Tesshu’s student was so fast and skillful that he managed to deflect the horses kick. Everyone nearby could see that a less skilled man would have been badly hurt or even killed. Of course , the story of this young swordsman’s skill spread very quickly though the town, but to everyone's surprise, two days later he had been dismissed form Tesshu’s school of swordsmanship. When one of the town- fold got up the courage to ask tesshu why such a promising student had bee dismissed he said of the incident with the horse “ the student had clearly failed to learn what i had to teach.” This seem utterly bizarre to the town-folk and though they pressed him to explain with he meant tesshu would say no more on the matter.

So the town fold cooked up a plan to see if they could catch tesshu out. Surely he could do no better than the younger student in the same situation, what more could a man do ? If there was some magic that Tesshu could work, they all wanted to see it ! Tesshu walked the same route form his home to his school every day. It was always the same so it was not hard for the locals to find a particularly irritable horse and tie i up outside one of the shops on Tesshu’s route they then all went about there business surreptitiously keeping an eye out for tesshu to come past. A little while later at jut his usual time teshu was walking the way he always walked. As eh approached the horse, everyone watched with baited breath.. but just before Tesshu got to where the horse was tied up, he crossed the street and walked by on the other side.”

I would say that Tesshu dismissed his student for a lack of Responsibility. His knee-jerked reaction showed amazing skill, but he lacked the awareness required to be able to respond effectively to the world around him. What if the horse had been injured or had got more distressed and hurt someone else.? That said, tessu was a master and it’s important to remember that we are all human- beings and while we can aspire to the highest of standards we will all slip sometimes- I suspect even Tesshu had moment where he stumbled on the path!

All to often in life we polarize our choices. We think it a ll has to be either black or white, right or wrong goo bad. This happens unconsciously in so much that we do that we do and it happens i power dynamics as well. Many people who feel victimized- by a person or just by life’s circumstances, consciously or unconsciously- will think the way out is to become a persecutor. Few people wold recognize it in those terms consciously, but what might be easier to recognize is a mindset that say’s “ if you don’t want to be the prey, become the predator.”

Sadly, if you choose to be a predator, other have to be prey, that's the way it work and whether you mean to or not, while you’re trying to free yourself form fear, you become the object of others peoples fear. as the Persian poet rumi put it: “ people of the world don’t look at themselves, and so they blame one another.”

as the zen master shunryu suzuki put it. This is a warrior’s choice: to refuse to be either victim or persecutor predator or prey. I believe there is always a kind of magical their option in any situation. L life is rarely only black or white.

The final aspect of responsibility i want to explore is how we can end up punishing ourselves our of a misguided seance of responsibility. What we are really doing is blaming ourselves and as i discussed at the beginning of the chapter, there responsibility has nothing to do with blame. The irony i that in this kind of self blame it actually limit our capacity for true responsibility because our pain will cloud our judgment and probably inhibit our awareness. I find it hard to mange this myself. As i have said , not only is it not accurate, it is also debilitating. It stops us doing the real work of responsibility. The blame game whether we turn on others or turn on ourselves will only cause more pain it never heals. That is why this distinction around responsibility which red kofman has made so concisely is so important: we are unconditionally responsible in the face of our circumstances, we are not necessarily responsible for what life brings us in the first place. If we wish to be true warrior then we must get a hold of this distinction and live it as fully as possible, otherwise we will constantly be compromised in our capacity to respond consciously to our environment. Our energy will be tie up with blaming – either ourselves or other. Responsibility requires great awareness and no small amount of courage but it is the gate way to our greatest power.