When I look back, I know with certainty there are many things I should not have done. But they are part of me, part of who I have become, and they have a place in the context of my life. They are reminders that mistakes can be built on, that journeys are filled with learning and that the right path, whatever ‘right’ may mean for you, is often only a step away.

We don’t need to predict every detail, nor could we if we tried. But if we want to make the future better, we need to identify actions that have positive effects on balance over very long timescales.

For these reasons changing values has particularly great significance from a longterm perspective. Looking to the past, we see that such changes have had an enormous impact on the lives of billions of people. Looking to the future, if we can improve the values that guide the behaviour of generations to come, we can be pretty confident that they will take better actions, even if they’re living in a world very different from our own, the nature of which we cannot predict.

It [choosing] requires knowing how what happened to us influences the choices we made and continue to make. Again and again I ask my clients, ‘How are you complicit in creating the conditions of your lives that you say you don’t want?

11. Choosing Responsibilities

A turning point for me in this study came when I happened across a comment from Toni Morrison buried in a 1985 interview: “You see, the point is that freedom is choosing your responsibility. It’s not having no responsibilities; it’s choosing the ones you want.” Morrison’s comment cast a light back over the lives in this study to highlight a crucial ingredient in feeding the inner fire: Freedom does not mean the absence of responsibilities; freedom means that you get to choose your responsibilities.