Taking radical responsibility for your life

“Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called ‘the love of your fate.’ Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, ‘This is what I need.’ It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! this is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.” --Joseph Campbell

This taking radical responsibility for your life seems hard, doesn’t it? This letting go and agreeing to say “This is what I need” to whatever comes your way. I’ve called it by a few different names, whether it’s what I refer to in The Courageous Living Program as embracing all that comes into the circle of your existence. It’s simply being willing to say thank you in the midst of crisis.

It seems hard to take radical responsibility for your life, but whenever we step in this direction, we quickly discover that what was harder all along was the resistance.

Radical Responsibility

I ask myself this question a lot: Am I taking responsibility for my life?

What I find at the center of almost any unhappiness in my life is a refusal to take radical responsibility for my life, my choices, and my responses to what I see coming into the circle of my resistance.

The responsibility is in realizing that I have the power to choose my intentions, where I place my attention, and whether I am being reactive (fear-based) or responsive (courage-based).

Taking responsibility is my obsession. It’s like I’ve become hungry for taking this radical responsibility.

I call it “radical” because I’m talking about taking the kind of responsibility where, say, someone could get in my face and tell me that I’m a pathetic f*ckwad or some other series of names that “anyone” who is a “normal” human being would “naturally” respond to by “not taking it” and “stepping up to defend” themselves, and instead of all that, I aspire to be someone who will…

…observe what comes up for me. Feel the anger rise in my body. Sense the despair that truly lies underneath. Accept all of it. Look at this person who is so mired in their Story about me and themselves and the world, and …take radical responsibility for my life by responding from the place of my highest self and the world that I want to create, rather than by meeting hatred with hatred.

This is day-to-day, life stuff. If I put myself in powerless positions where I’m unwilling to speak my own truth in the face of someone else’s agenda, and from a powerless place I want to make it about them and how they’re being so unfair with their demands? I want to choose to take radical responsibility for my life.

In every single area where there is disconnection between me and myself, me and another, me and any thing that is in the world, where I want to justify why they are wrong and I am right, or where I criticize myself as wrong and that spins out into a whole “thing”? I want to choose to take radical responsibility for my life—after all, I’m the one choosing whether to focus on the judgments or focus on what else is possible.

Then there are the critiques: What a Pollyanna. Lost Touch With Reality. A Little Too Purple Light Woo-Woo For My Tastes. Happy People Are So Annoying.

So even with those responses, I want to take radical responsibility for my life: having a keen awareness, and acceptance of, the Stories that other people might run about who I am, and consciously responding to their reactions from the place of my highest self, my most courageous self, and my vision for my life and who I want to be.

Bringing Love

“If you bring love to that moment–not discouragement–you will find the strength is there.” — Joseph Campbell

To do this work of taking radical responsibility for your life, there’s no need to wait for life’s bigger disasters. We can start practicing with everything that is before us, the right-now annoyances of our lives, including the bad drivers, testy cashiers, and long lines at the post office that life brings.

And once we-you-me-I start practicing, it becomes quickly evident that it took far more effort to keep putting up those fearful defenses against life, and that life is waiting for us with open arms, whenever we’re ready.

That’s what I think Campbell meant when he said that if we bring love and not discouragement, we find that strength is there. There’s a lot of effort put into discouragement. Love seems like the more difficult option, but only when we don’t realize how we are getting in our own way.