Love & Responsibility

Responsibility -- go to the root meaning of the word: it means to be responsive. Love is a response! When the other calls, you are ready. When the other invites, you enter the other. When the other is not inviting, you don't interfere, you don't trespass. When the other sings, you sing in response. When the other gives you her or his hand, you take it with deep response.

Responsibility means openness, readiness, to respond. Somebody is calling and you don't respond, you remain closed. Somebody wants to love you but you don't help, you don't co-operate; rather, you create barriers. If this is the thing you are doing -- and the majority of lovers go on doing this -- when the other calls you don't respond, then when you call the other does not respond. Because when the other calls you see that this would be a good ego enhancing thing -- not to respond. Then you feel your own master: nobody can push you, and nobody can pull you into something which you were not going into already; you don't follow anybody.

When the other's being calls ready! -- be ready; respond with your totality. Don't be a miser -- that is the meaning of responsibility.

But in your sense love has no responsibility. The word has been corrupted, destroyed, poisoned.
A mother says to the child, I am your mother, you have to be responsible for me. A husband says, I am your husband, and I work hard for you. You have to be responsible for me. A father says to the son, Don't be irresponsible! Whenever you do something always think of me. This is not responsibility, you have corrupted a beautiful word. It has become ugly. Responsibility has become almost synonymous with duty. And duty is an ugly word.

Love is beautiful; if you love your mother -- you love, but it cannot be a duty. If it is duty it is better not to love, because duty is not going to satisfy her. And if you are doing your duty because she is your mother and she has given birth to you, what can you do? -- you have to take care. When she is ill you have to sit by her side -- then all the time, if it is a duty, your mind is against her, you are feeling suffocated, you are feeling burdened, in a bondage, you would like to rebel and revolt. And if this mother dies, you may not say so to anybody, but you will feel relief.

What type of responsibility is this -- when the mother dies and the son feels a deep relief? Of course he cries and weeps -- of course; and it is not that he is showing others that he is crying and weeping -- in fact, if you had loved your mother there may have been no tears, but you have not loved your mother, now the opportunity is lost. You never loved your mother and now she is gone! Hence the tears, the so much weeping and crying -- it is pathological, it is not healthy. If you had really loved your mother then what is there to weep and cry about? She is gone!

A deep silence surrounds you. In that deep silence you start understanding death, you become aware of your own death. When your mother dies -- or your father dies -- it is an indication that you will have to die. Then you become involved with death. You try to understand it.
While she was alive she helped you to understand life. Now she is gone, she has opened another door -- the door of death, to look into: because she has gone and you will have to follow.

If you have loved a person, when the person is gone you don't feel relief -- and you don't cry, and you don't weep. In deep silence you accept the fact, the helplessness of it -- and the love continues, because love does not end with the body, love does not end with the mind, love goes on flowing.


When there is no love, the question of responsibility comes in. When there is no love, you start talking about duty. When there is love, love itself is responsibility.


Source~ Tao: The Three Treasures