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?

Choosing Responsibilities: This means making deep commitments to freely chosen responsibilities. These responsibilities might be visible and public, or they might be personal and private.

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.

As I worked on this book, I puzzled where core values fit into the research findings. To be clear, there is no single unified set of core values across all the people in this study. That said, each person developed a set of values somewhere along the way, some more explicitly than others. These values might have come from family, or mentors, or teachers, or military service, or the ethics of their field, or the social milieu in which they lived, or their faith traditions, or reading and reflection, or personal experience, or some combination. I came to see that living to a set of core values is a choice, a personal responsibility of the highest order.

The key idea here— whether public or private, whether in line with what other people think you should do or not— is the combination of two words: “choosing” and “responsibilities.” My enduring great friend Tom Tierney puts it this way, “What are you doing that meets the ‘but for’ test? What are you getting done that would not otherwise happen ‘but for you’ even if almost no one ever knows about it?”