The Role of Your 'Unique Responsibility' in Becoming Whole
Responding to the Call of What Is ‘Yours to Do’
The Weight of Responsibility
The word ‘responsibility’ carries an enormous amount of negative charge for many people. Since we were young, we had others weaponize it, and deploy it into our psyche to encase our actions, constrict our desires or justify the way they robbed us of our curiosity by telling us to focus elsewhere.
‘You can’t do that because you have this responsibility’.
or…
You must do this, because it is your responsibility.
It’s a powerful tool that does a hatchet job on your innate homing signals, you know, those potent inner senses that allow you direct your own resources, because you are left following others prerogatives. Not only this, but it takes the blame off them and places it on you.
It’s your responsibility…to follow our prerogatives. Uhhhh….
Parents, schools, employers, social justice groups, and nations all use this weapon.
It sucks, I get it.
I myself resisted anything that carried a whiff of the word for a long time.
Why? Because these iterations of responsibility are typically false (as in not actually yours to do) or at best lesser (as in not aligned with a deeper divine purpose).
Call and Response
‘Call and response’ is a late Paleolithic (as in 10,000-12,000 years old) tradition that began in sub-Saharan African cultures and has become an integral part of African American cultural practices. It is commonly found in music, where one section of a band poses a musical phrase or ‘question,’ and another section responds with an ‘answer.’
I was first exposed to 'call and response’ dynamics as a child during the ritual invocations of African deities that were a part of the Afro-Cuban religion I grew up in.
During these ritual invocations you would send out a call to deity, and then immediately respond as the deity, both relating to the god as ‘other’, and becoming them simultaneously.
It is similar to how prayer, divination and dance work as well.
This interplay between call and response, is so old because it expresses and underlying principle of how nature works: signal, stimulus, transmission, response and resonance.
We live in a call and response universe.
This is critical to grasp because it’s at the root of real or greater responsibility.
The word responsibility is a conjunction of two primary roots.
Respond
Ability
In other words, the word means ‘the ability to respond’.
But respond to what? A call.
The Gravity of Responsibility
The ability to respond…what a concept. Which implies that if you do not have the ability to respond, then the call goes unanswered (a topic for another day).
Now…responsibility feels heavy regardless of how you slice it.
Why?
Because it has a gravity that pulls you towards it, the way a gas giant the size of Jupiter draws forth moons (95 as of the most recent count). The difference between ‘lesser’ and ‘greater’ responsibility is the difference between being a pack mule, and being a moon.
Here’s the thing…
The mysterious forces that organize life sends us calls. Some of these calls are small and require discreet short lived action, where as others are lifelong (or multi-lifetime) callings.
We all know when we hear them because when heard, deep down we know that if we do not have the ability to respond, as in take responsibility, no one else will: the call goes unanswered.
Greater responsibility is unique to you; it belongs to you and you belong to it. These are the events that life has uniquely prepared you to respond to, and placed in front of you. While many of us in todays culture think of wholeness in terms of unlocking more freedom, in my experience, you remain incomplete with those responsibilities which are yours to do.
Those could be:
Problems you are inspired and uniquely suited to address
Helping people you know no one else will help
Creating a piece of art that only you can make
Doing work in the spirit world that will go undone without you
Taking care of a family member no one else will
Putting down an animal that is suffering
Starting a movement because only you can see the need
Doing work that only you can do in the unique way you can
And more….
These are examples, and that’s all.