ACCEPTANCE MONTH: DAY 30: “Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.” ― Elizabeth Edwards
Acceptance creates space in our lives that is otherwise mis-spent on fighting what we don’t like about life. This is fruitless, but we spend so much of our time talking and talking and talking about what is going on. We somehow believe this changes something. We whine and complain and bitch and moan about so much!
Growing older, all the ailments of the human body, religion, politics, disappointment with what others are doing or not doing, gossip, wah, wah, wah…it is endless and tedious and terrible.
Why do we waste so much of our life putting life down? What if we just accept life as it comes and let it be and get on with living? Only one reason…our incredible fear of it all! Does that help? NO!!!
So, wake up each morning with the intention of just sitting still, letting life be life. No matter what happens in the course of this day, it is a day of your life. Do something to make yourself feel good about it.
Be happy! It is all your job, not the Universe nor God, or anyone else is responsible for your well-being or happiness. Just be happy. Don’t wait for things to be the way you want them to be. Accept what is sitting in front of you today and move into it and embrace it and make it wonderful. Why? Because IT IS!
Even if there is sadness, fear, anger. Those come only because of the story you are telling about what is happening.
We don’t even have to “Put together something that is good” as the quote says. We can sit with the ugliest of things and say…” this is beautiful, and I love it.” When we get to the end of this life, we will have loved and appreciated what we got and did; rather than regretting that all we did was whine and complain about life.
We all have that kind of ego. Step 1 reminds us to let go of that, be powerless over life (ALL OF IT!) and move into acceptance, because it is the only road to happiness that lasts.
Getting what we think we want lasts for about 5 seconds, and then we want something else; ad nauseum. Wanting what we have and loving it and holding it means we are less full of sorrow and regret when it leaves. If all we do is try to “fix” people, places, things and life, we are doomed to a great deal of grief when we realize we never learned to love and accept them at all. This is the biggest regret we have at the end of life; whether it is ours or theirs. LET GO!
