Keeping Freedom

Personal responsibility is freedom.

Knowing personal responsibility is freedom, I am likely to want it for others.

Knowing personal responsibility is freedom, every impulse to offer it to others is an opportunity to claim it for myself.

At first I did this grudgingly, and it tasted like crow.

Now I do it eagerly, and it is the delight of choosing my favorite flavor.

Whatever I think someone else should do, I look in my own life for where I can do that thing. I stay busy in my own business, and my improvement efforts circulate into my life where I reap the rewards. If I can't do it or can't do it better, I mourn for me and for them, a lost opportunity which was only ever imagined.

Whatever responsibility I judge another for shirking, I have the opportunity to embrace. If it would free them, it would free me. If it would benefit them, it will benefit me, and I can make sure it happens and make sure I receive all the benefits of it. I can be in peace the whole time, noticing the gap and solving the problem I am the one to see.

I keep my advice about personal responsibility to myself. I don’t tell them to shut the door when it’s hanging open and making me cold; I stand up and blissfully shut the door.

I keep my knowing about what's responsible FOR myself, and opt-in to taking actions that bring everything in my purview to my own exquisite standard.

I am the one to be freed by my own understanding of what it means to shoulder and assume responsibility.

I am the one to claim this freedom every time I'm tempted to offer it to another person.