Ahh, responsibility. That’s in the eye of the beholder I suppose. I think people think I’m quite responsible. I could be wrong.

You know those graphs, negative correlations? I bet the longer people have known me, the less they think I’m a super responsible guy.

That sounds defeatist. Negative self talk. But maybe that’s just true for everybody. The better you’re known in the context of a community, the more the community knows your secrets. The more they know your downsides, the ways you are, in fact, irresponsible sometimes. Because we all are on some level. Irresponsible. We all neglect to make the best choices in some circumstances, and we’re often remembered and known more for our negative traits than our positive ones. Isn’t that sad and unfair?

We move out of our parents’ house and live on a steady diet of off-brand lucky charms and cheap beer.

We buy a bicycle, (two bicycles), and allow the rubber tires to deteriorate before the little rubber injection molding (“vent spews”) wear off.

We run our dad’s pretty nice 1985 GMC Jimmy all the way out of oil and burn that engine RIGHT up.

I can speak to all of these choices with the authority of experience.

Still, I grew up with a high value for responsibility. I grew up believing responsibility to be a thing worth working hard for and attaining. Which I suppose would be a responsible way to approach responsibility.

I have spoken at length about my creativity and my value for capability. Those things are parts and pieces of responsibility I think.

I reflect on lambing season. For a time when I was growing up we had sheep. Sometimes many sheep. In the spring, lambing season would begin. In the winter, actually. The ground still saturated and difficult, sheep would begin bringing about new life in about February. And it was my job to bring them all into the barn, because it was still awfully cold and early in the year for them to be out in the field alone. I have been told this is no longer common practice?

But our practice was this; my siblings and I would go out to the field and scan for sheep standing firm over a newborn lamb. While the rest of the flock would meander and scatter away from us, the new mother would stand vigilantly by her offspring. Our goal was to tenderly retrieve the lamb and hold it low so that the mother could keep contact with it. Too high, too fast and she’d be liable to get feisty. And a feisty ewe is no small threat to a 70 pound boy.

Slowly and deliberately we’d draw the mother ewe into the barn baited by her own lamb until she was safe in a lambing pen; a small enclosure of about five feet square.

We’d then use a pair of scissors to snip the umbilical cord and dip the remaining bit in a special splash-less cup of iodine. Finally we’d reunite mother and child and put a heat lamp on one side of the pen in order to give the lamb it’s best possible chance at thriving.

Later our technique changed slightly. We’d take a three wheeler out to the field, grab the lamb and hang it off the back and book it into the barn as quick as we could get the mother to follow. I am a little ashamed of this, thinking back. I don’t know that anyone knew the better of it at the time. But looking back, I think there was an invitation to tenderness and care that the three-wheeler obfuscated. We still had a our moments in the barn, clipping a clean edge off the umbilical cord and treating it to prevent infection. There were moments of feeding and bedding and warming that were kindnesses I suppose. But the whole matter was treated as a chore rather than an honor and I regret that now. To have animals in our care should be an honor. It can be. It should be.

Responsibility can probably be overshadowed or over-informed by obligation. A sense that some things just must be done, like it or not, by hook or by crook, come hell or high water. And that can be a dangerous thing. We stay in friendships that are toxic and untenable. We carry on working for a boss who is cruel or abusive. We endlessly stick by a partner who is no partner at all. Obligation speaks of our present age to me. It’s almost a virtue signal to be heavily obligated today and in this society. How much better would it be to take responsibility for ourselves in order to better care for others?

I think now of responsibility alongside the word “stewardship”. And I think of the things I have in my life to steward. Chiefly my children. Have I stewarded them well? Perhaps. In part, at least.

My oldest child is taking their first breaths of the free air of adulthood and that is a bitter pill to swallow for me. Not because they are in any particular sense irresponsible, but because they bear the same haste of youth that I did, and because it is a demarcation of time passing; I can no longer be responsible for them the way I have been in the past. The piper has come to call, and I am receiving my rewards and consequences. Gone are the days of my making responsible choices on their behalf and all that is left to do is to be responsible for myself. For the choices I made during their short period of childhood. To own my mistakes and revel in our shared victories over the last eighteen years or so.

I think of the land. I think of the land I grew up on, and the land I live on now. I think of this land I love, this broad and good land where I am most at home. Responsibility and stewardship again raise their tall flags in my heart as I think and wonder how I might best be a steward of this land.

I get angry thinking about the choices of men who care for extractive profit and gain over the land we are meant to love together. I cannot do this alone. I cannot care for this place all on my own, saving it and improving it for my children’s children’s children. And sometimes I feel very alone in these concerns. I know I am not; there are many who are concerned like I am about the future of our copse, our county, our valley, our whole world.

But, it seems, not enough of us, as the hastening trudge toward a much more desolate, much emptier future goes on. Irresponsible, that’s what it is! To think of today alone. To think of self alone. Me and my family alone.

Obligatory behavior can hardly be called responsible, and as I write this I am reflecting on the fact that while they’re often confused one for the other, they’re really polar opposites. Responsibility takes care of it. Obligation gets it out of the way.

The responsible thing to do may be to root out obligatory narratives in our lives opting instead for, as I said, care. Care for ourselves, care for our loved ones. Care for the good soil beneath our feet.

Did you know my brother has ten species of forage on his land? It is his land in a daily and a legal sense, but it is our land by tradition. It’s the land where I made my memories and retrieved lambs and wept over fallen trees. My brother is intentional and directive about his stewardship of the land and that’s an inspiration to me. We are never together for very long before he’s talking about soil health and I love that so much about him. Tomorrow is slightly better because of his choices and values.

I want to look at all of my modern choices with an eye on those lambs. How good it is to go out on a brisk morning, boots and coat, and walk quietly in the dew or the rain, to avoid the deepest pools of water in the fields where I’ve made my home, to search quietly for the small, the innocent and the needy ones. To mindfully draw them into a warmer, drier place. It may not be altogether natural, but it is a kind of kindness. To think ahead. To frugally prepare.

And that brings me to those modern choices. So much of my adult life has been obligatory and I’ll tell you the truth–I don’t know how much more of it I can take. I have been so guilty of dressing obligation up in the fancy clothes of responsibility. I have admitted that I did not enter my industry as most do–from a place of passion and commitment. But it feels too frightening to make a change sometimes. What would I do? What else could I ever do, I wonder.

These essays themselves–they are not obligatory for me, perhaps the opposite. They’re bringing me life, it’s fun to explore these values that have become so important in my life.

But that sentiment, that whole statement was all about me and my needs. I reflect on some of my confessions and admissions in recent essays. Are they honoring to the people around me? Is it responsible to speak so candidly into an internet so devoid of care?

I hope so. I hope I am holding these stories low to the ground. I hope I am walking slowly. I hope I am bringing them into the barn, and not just booking it on the three-wheeler.

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