The Conundrum of Personal Responsibility

Responsibility

What is personal responsibility? Before this prompt, I had never thought about the meaning of the phrase; when I hear personal responsibility, what comes to mind is the ability to take responsibility for one's own actions and the extent to which a person is willing to take responsibility. For me learning to take responsibility is something that has never come naturally, I would rather make an elaborate excuse or blame the situation on someone else, but I have slowly but surely learned the the "easy" way out is never the best way out. It is easy to relate to a subject like this one by making a scenario that explains the importance of the subject through a real-life example.

Imagine this, you have a group of very trusted friends and they all want to go to a rated-R movie (even though you are underage) and tell you that there is no chance of getting caught. Being the gullible person you are, you take their offer and go out to see the rated-R. Shortly after entering the theatre they make lots of noise and are soon taken out of the theatre along with you and then proceed to put the blame on you since, you are, the gullible one. So are you to blame for their noise? The answer varies from person to person, but the answer is simple. Yes you are. 

WHY you are responsible, is an easy question to answer as well. If you knowingly agreed to take a risk by going to the movie, you also unknowingly agree to take responsibility for the many possible consequences for that action. No matter what terrible repercussion may have happened at that theatre, you are automatically partly responsible because you, of your own free will, chose to venture out to the movies. That is a simple way of explaining the meaning of personal responsibility, and how to distinguish whether or not a situation is your responsibility or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjSPzvY8OQ

Like the video above illustrates, the woman has to take obvious responsibility for her actions, and now knows that many situations can yield unexpected consequences if not handled with care.

The Exploration of the Unknown

The Unknown

              People throughout the ages have explored the unknown one way or another. Some have explored the unknown by traveling to new foreign lands, like the first character in Frankenstein, writing to his sister of his travels and his expedition to the Arctic Circle. Others have explored the unknown simply by trying new foods, traveling down a back road they have until then avoided, or maybe even just breaking away from their daily routines. And there are some like me, who use music to express their individualism and have in the past experimented, tried, failed, and succeeded in triumphantly exploring the unknown borders of music and sound that no one else had tread. I think that people choose to devote themselves to going where others haven't gone before for the same reason I play my music. They do this to discover, or even create something new and uncommon that they can call their own; they do this to show the world that there are still beautiful things yet to be stumbled upon, and to bring new hope to those who think they have experienced this world to it's fullest but haven't yet begun to live. Although it is a noble effort, to want to change people's perspective of this world, a success of that caliber doesn't come easy. To truly make a change, it takes dedication, commitment, diligence, and huge sacrifices of time and sometimes even sleep. To explore the unknown is an enormously daunting task for one reason, because it is unknown; because a person can never know for sure what they might find or what they might lose, only that in order to truly succeed, they must hope for the best and expect the very worst.

"A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown."

Denis Waitley