Somewhere along the line, “duty” became a four-letter word. A “bad” word. A negative word.

Somewhere along the line we associated duty with responsibilities that no one would take on unless forced.

I‘d like to suggest that “duty” and “privilege” are two sides of the same coin. I’d go so far as to promise that an attitude revolution is waiting for you if you can see your obligations as gifts. Gifts for which the most appropriate response is dedicated engagement.

To commit to a duty is a promise to complete something out of dedicated engagement.

Somewhere along the line, though, we lose the “dedicated engagement” part of the equation and end up with only the dry “promise.”

“I get to” gets reduced to “I have to.” And so our experience is diminished into something no better than a coerced chore.

In fact, though, we commit to tasks of value. We need a way to remind ourselves of the gift, the privilege, and the value underlying our promise to fulfill a particular duty.

We need a way to engage with complicated, difficult or nasty components of our commitments that draws on our original rationale for making the commitment in the first place.

An attitude revolution is waiting for you. Duty may be a four-letter word after all. G – I – F – T.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Loving Monday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.