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honour.  Barristan and Ned Stark are two examples of people for whom that is not the case.  Tyrion exhibits a lot of personal freedom too in this way.  Jon Snow also shows a huge reserve of personal integrity and response-ability.  There are others, but they are rare, and most of them slip up at some point.  As I say, this is a tough path to walk - I fully acknowledge that and I'm not trying to pretend I'm writing this as someone who is perfect and always standing in my full power, holding responsibility as deeply as I'd like.  All I feel I can do is keep working at it to become constantly more aware and constantly more response-able.
    Many spiritual philosophies from around the world acknowledge the innate difficulty of leading a good life.  One of Buddha's four noble truths is most commonly translated as “Life is suffering.”  Kung-fu has at it's heart a similar philosophy which resonates for me.  'Kung-Fu' can be translated a number of different ways some of which make fairly obvious sense, such as 'Skilful Movement' but one of the less obvious ones is 'Time and Hard Work.'  It is this second translation which I find most useful.  While learning to be skilful in your movements will take time and hard work, at another layer this translation speaks to me of just what I have been describing about the path of responsibility: a responsible life takes time and is hard work!  That may not seem like a very positive message, but the beauty of it is that if I can accept that life is hard work, that it is often difficult and that suffering is an unavoidable aspect of existence, then ironically, the hard work, the difficulty, the suffering sort of disappears.  It's not that these things are any less true of the circumstances of my life but if I accept the reality of the difficulty I don't struggle with it in the same way any more.  This is the most profound level of responsibility.  It is my struggle against the challenges in life that create my discomfort.  If I take really full ownership of my responses then life is only hard, difficult, or full of suffering because I judge it to be.  Stuff happens.  Life is not a giant persecutor trying to inflict pain, God is not a great big bully in the sky.  Stuff happens.  And my judgement of it as hard or easy; joyful or difficult; pleasure or suffering is my first response.  Stuff happens, I make a judgement about it, I take action upon it.  If I can deeply, deeply accept that some of what life offers me will be challenging then I don't need to judge it in the same way.  I create my own suffering, life just hands me experiences.  Carlos Casteneda, in writing about the path of a warrior shaman, puts it like this:
     
    "Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge (or path of responsibility) . A warrior cannot complain or regret anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges."
     
    There is no question that what life hands people is different.  I cannot even begin to conceive what it was like for Viktor Frankl living through his time in a concentration camp, nor do I ever want to experience such horrors.  I have no idea if I would be able to live this philosophy were I to face such a challenge.  However, Viktor Frankl's dignity in the face of such a terrible life experience gives me hope that we all have the potential to transcend our circumstances and embrace our deepest human freedom: response-ability.  As Aldous Huxley said:
     
    "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him."
     
    King Robert Baratheon has failed to embrace his responsibility.  I can have compassion for him as a man who lost his love, and has found himself as King of a nation he is ill-equipped to rule.  He was fortunate to have Jon Arryn at his side for so many years, but in another way perhaps that helped him to continue to shirk his true responsibility.  It