From “Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most” by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz
Is life more like poker or more like war? How much maneuvering room do the “rules” of life give us? It’s hard to say. There are serious arguments on both sides. But regardless of where on the poker-to-war spectrum the truth falls, two points are important. First, you have some responsibility for the shape of your life. (The shape of your life includes both your wins and losses and how you play the game.) Second, that responsibility is not unlimited. It’s constrained. You didn’t get to say where you were born. An enormous stupefyingly complicated world is always shaping the situations you find yourself in. And you don’t get to determine the outcomes. (Elbow grease and pluck won’t guarantee you success. That’s an American fiction. And a harmful one, at that.)
Not even who you are is fully up to you. Everyone goes through things that shape them in ways they wouldn’t want if they’d had the choice. In really important ways, we simply find ourselves being who we are.
You are not an omnipotent dictator. You don’t call all the shots. That’s clear enoug.h.
But to go back to the first point, you are also not a rock. A rock doesn’t respond if someone picks it up, chisels it a bit, and lays it down as part of a garden path. You do respond, in limited but nevertheless very real ways, to what happens to and around you. You play your hand.
You’re not a hamster either. A hamster does respond if someone picks it up. There might even be a sense in which it decides how to respond. But a hamster can’t ask how it ought to respond. You can. And because you can, you’re responsible for whether or not you do.
Even here, there are constraints. Ancient Mayans couldn’t just decide that enlightenment or following Jesus or seeking racial justice was what life is really about, what they should be seeking. Those weren’t even thinkable possibilities for them. But the responsibility here is real nevertheless. Just because there’s a normal path to follow doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for whether you follow it or not. Just because there’s a standard vision for the good life for someone like you doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for whether or not you make it your own.
This is the most fundamental form of that constrained responsibility that characterizes your life. It’s the responsibility to discern, as best you can, what kind of life would be truly worth seeking – the responsibility to see the Question and respond to it.