Responsibility

“It’s okay. I am a grown up, I can’t always blame other people”. This sentence has made me smile yesterday. It gave me a pleasant and calming effect also. I don’t know why. Perhaps because of a purely selfish reason, meaning I was relieved to be freed from being responsible for other people. Perhaps because I have been blamed too many times by somebody else just shortly before, that it gave me a warm feeling when another person was then able to say the opposite. Or perhaps because it reminded me of myself, long time ago, when I have said the very same words.

How far actually is our responsibility for other people’s life? I don’t know. I know that we can have influence on other people, that we could be catalyst for other people’s process. But catalyst, by definition, is just a small portion of an agent to increase the rate of a process. It is not even a part of the products. Then how much actually we can be blamed for when other people’s life cannot go smoothly at the moment when our paths cross? How much actually we can be blamed for other people misfortunes and unhappiness?

I don’t know. Perhaps guilty feeling arises from a habit, not from conscience. But one thing I know for sure. That when somebody takes matter in his own hand, then you know everything will be okay for him. Because only when you take responsibility for yourself, when you are willing to help yourself, then you can make a lot of things better.