Guilt vs Responsibility

  I am continuing to reflect on guilt and its relationship to responsibility. I think part of the confusion for me in this area is that I tend to associate these two together, because guilt often seems to be a 'motivator' to take responsibility, or at least the feeling of regret or remorse. I am ambivalent about guilt, because the emotion itself is always trying to recruit the mind. But again, is guilt a truly constructive emotion? And as for responsibility--what are the limits, if any, to that for which a person must be responsible?
   To give one example: there is an argument that says something like, you are fully responsible for what happens to you. If I recall the book Zero Limits by Joe Vitale, there is this idea that one should assume that everything that happens to oneself is really the result of the perfect arising of cause and conditions. Therefore, it's only fitting that a person approach their challenges in life with an attitude of humility: the sense that I am simply responding to situations that have ripened from previous actions or karma. So far so good...but what is it that prevents this attitude from taking on more than what a person can do? What prevents this practice from becoming too burdensome to carry?
  I think that with Zero Limits, the goal is not at all to take on other people's problems, as though one had to solve everything and make everyone happy. In fact, I think one of the messages in this book is the opposite: namely that we can cultivate a wholesome intention to help other beings without necessarily even communicating with them directly. And I think that it's exactly this attitude which prevents the practice of taking responsibility not as burdensome as it might seem in other contexts. There is a very small spark of kindness, and all it really requires is an awareness to nurture it. And it comes from owning up to the fact that things are here in this moment for very specific reasons.
     This responsibility is quite different from guilt. Whereas guilt tends to focus on what has already passed (for which there is no turning back, really), responsibility is relating more to the incomplete present. I cannot 'take responsibility' for that over which I no longer have a meaningful choice. Even in the case of having a debilitating illness, one can still take responsibility for how one behaves and thinks about the illness itself. In that sense, there is always this tiny window of choice, which arises from the attitude I decide to take toward what faces me. And I know that if the conditions around me have already arisen as they have, then I had might as well accept those conditions.
    The key point is that responsibility requires a clear-eyed responsiveness to conditions, whereas guilt is something that really cannot be responded to, because there is something closed about it. Guilt is that sensation of, "you can't go back to being who you were", and there is a heaviness associated with it. But responsibility says: even though one cannot turn back to the past, there is still some way to respond to the present, and this is the empowering aspect of responsibility.