Reacting vs Responding: The Importance of Taking Responsibility For Our Lives

Today I want to talk about responsibility. I always hear people saying that we need to take responsibility for our lives, so today I just want to break down the word responsibility. To me, it’s a really important and significant word. The word responsibility contains “response” and “ability” which to me means that the main significance and meaning of responsibility is our ability to respond in the moment. If you observe how most of us live our lives you will realize that most of us don’t live in this way, which is to consciously respond to our life’s events from moment to moment.

Most of us mainly live our lives through our conditioned habits through memory and when we unconsciously live through our habits we’re not responding, we are reacting. I’m sure you know a lot of people in your life that you know exactly what buttons you can push and the reaction you’ll get. In this way, a lot of us are more like organic robots. If you really observe your reactions you may see that it is simply a response from memory, with memory being the past. So, as we go through our life’s events and through certain circumstances in time we become predictable with our behavior. The problem is that in a reactive behavior, your conscious volition is not needed and the reaction acts for you. There’s no freedom in this and in order to live healthy happy lives we need to be free.

I feel that in any moment that you really felt a sense of real happiness, these were moments where you were in a space of freedom from your past. We need to learn to respond to life because in reaction we are slaves to our past. In order to take full responsibility for our lives, we have to really understand what that means. Typically when people say they need to take responsibility for their life is after the fact. We say that we’ll take responsibility for whatever happened due to our unconscious reactions and unfortunately, many people that are in jail are paying for their reactions. If they could have had a little more awareness or a little more understanding of their inner processes they could have possibly avoided their fate by not identifying with their habitual tendencies when the external world triggered them.

It is of the utmost importance that we learn to really understand the difference between a reaction and a conscious response. A reaction is from memory, a response is from our In-the-moment awareness that is simultaneously aware of our inner processes and external environment. There’s nothing wrong with using memory as long as you are using it with awareness. Memory is a beautiful mechanism for its utility value. I need memory in order to know how to get back home but there’s a certain point at which memory becomes a hindrance. At some point, memory has such a tremendous amount of momentum and power that it begins to live our lives for us. So for today, I just want you to contemplate the difference between a reaction and what it means to respond to life.

Take care and I hope you have a good day! – Ivan