Responsibility

I find that as I grow older, my responsibilities grow. Sounds pretty obvious, I suppose, but it hasn't made sense to me until I started living it in real time. There's the really obvious ones, like the responsibilities of paying the bills, having a job, being more mature, etc. But there's responsibilities I didn't anticipate.

In general, I think part of growing up is accepting responsibility for your actions. Adults own up to it when they do something they shouldn't have, plain and simple. The more I'm around college students on a daily basis, I realize that they're still young. They still have a lot of growing up to do, and so do I. However, as you get older, admitting when you've done wrong becomes all the more important. There's no honor or positive outcome in trying to put responsibility for your wrongs on someone else. As a kid, you think, "Oh, wow, I did something really bad, and I'm going to get in trouble," and you want to avoid the punishment. That attitude still lingers in a lot of college students I encounter. However, as you grow older, people respect you more when you admit your responsibility for an action. We all make mistakes. We all do dumb things.

As I've grown, I've started to realize further the responsibility I have towards others. We have a responsibility towards others in every interaction we have. Take dating, for example. You are responsible for your own feelings, but you're also responsible for how your actions affect the person you're dating. If you're a bad partner, you're responsible for it. When you're 18 and dating is less serious, you have less responsibility. That's not to say you shouldn't try to be a good person at all ages, but as you grow older, and your actions carry more weight, inevitably there comes more responsibility with those actions. I'm realizing that as I go along. If you screw up monumentally and break someone's heart at 16, it's not as big of a deal as if you do it at 25.

You have more responsibility toward your friends as you grow older. The problems we encounter carry more substance as we grow, and your shoulder to lean on needs to be sturdier. We're responsible for more in general. We all have so much on our plates, whether it's school, jobs, loans, relationships, family stuff, or any other number of things. Life carries more weight and has more meaning now. Quite frankly, I think the added weight makes things more beautiful. I find myself putting more passion into my work because it means something. My part-time jobs never merited very much passion. I find myself being deeper and more interested in a person in romantic love. It's less surface-level, and I don't dilly dally. If you're not my type, I move on. When you have less time, and everything carries more gravity, you quickly delegate what makes sense to take responsibility for and what doesn't.

I love having more responsibility in my life. It's been an adjustment post-college, and it took time to be ready for the 'real world.' Full-time jobs, loan payments, and first dates where a girl looks at you and thinks, "Is he the type of guy I could marry?" Real life hits hard, but it fights fairly. We're growing up, and it's not a negative thing. I have never been happier, but I have more responsibility than I've ever had in my life.

So, maybe I've finally found a maturity streak in my life (not too much obviously). Being an adult doesn't mean abandoning being a kid. It means keeping your spirit young but your decision-making more informed. It means taking all of your experience thus far, and using it to be a good person. I think I'll always be a kid at heart. I'll always have a child's curiosity, a bit of teenager recklessness, and to a certain degree an innocence, a desire to trust and be trusted.

Every time I get to the end of writing one of these, I think to myself, "Wow, that was a lot of rambling," but they always make sense in my head. Hope it's not too haphazard. Have a good week!