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If you want to live a peaceful life, you need acceptance. You need to accept things and people the way they are, no matter how much you would like them to be different. This wish won’t change anything after all.
Acceptance means:
- To accept that your best friend didn’t keep their promise, even though you needed them to do what they promised;
- To accept that your parents didn’t raise you the way you wanted and didn’t provide you the things you thought you needed;
- To accept that the person you are in love with doesn’t feel the same for you.
Acceptance means to accept things and people the way they are, not the way you wish them to be.
I don’t know if you understand how difficult this kind of acceptance is. A kind of acceptance where you don’t judge anything and anyone, and accept things exactly the way they are, no matter how much harm they would do to you.
To accept things such as:
- The impatience of the lady who works for the local government and who doesn’t feel like serving yet another customer, meaning you;
- The impulsiveness of the people in your life and the unfriendly treatment they have towards you;
- The injustice that someone with status has towards you, by believing your words mean nothing in that context.
It’s difficult to accept all these things and to continue doing what you set yourself to do.
If such acceptance drains your energy, it means you haven’t gotten to a point where you can accept things and people the way they are. It means there’s still resistance to the neutral state of whatever is going on around you.
What happens when you accept things and people the way they are
When you get to such a place in your life, life has a new meaning and the things that usually drain your energy become meaningless.
You end up understanding there’s no sense in judging people and putting tags on everything and everyone.
You end up understanding there’s no sense in getting angry or mad about something that happened because you see that specific thing that happened as something that had to happen. Even if you don’t agree with it.
You end up not seeing any more things as good or bad, but just as experiences that are guiding you towards the place that you should have gotten to anyway.
When you accept things and people the way they are, you are free. And this freedom can allow you to give any meaning to the things you experience.
Imagine you are walking towards a restaurant where you’ll have dinner with your friends. You forgot your phone back home and you can’t check your messages or communicate with any of your friends. But you know where you have to go and you’ll get there in 15-20 minutes.
All of a sudden, you see the sky becoming darker and, a few minutes later, it starts raining. It’s Tuesday evening, you are near the edge of the town, in a not-so-populated neighborhood, and you don’t see any taxis.
If you don’t accept the rain and the situation you’re in, exactly the way they are, you will tell yourself that you’ve been a fool for forgetting your phone at home, for not taking an umbrella with you, for not grabbing a taxi, and so on…
Instead, when you accept things as they are, you’ll be able to give whatever sense you want to the experience you’re having. You’ll be able to say you haven’t walked in the rain in a long time and even enjoy your wet clothes.
In other words, you won’t let that experience change your state in something negative.
The reason why acceptance is so difficult
Don’t imagine acceptance is easy. In fact, I recommend you to accept everything that appears in your life and enjoy it all. You’ll notice then how difficult acceptance can be.
A few days ago, I went to a local bookstore, with the intention of discussing with the manager about organizing a book club.
When I got there, I talked to an employee and told them about what I wanted to do. They told me that the manager is on a break and I simply replied “I can wait, no problem”. A few minutes later, the same employee comes back to me and recommends me to send an email to that local bookstore.
I found it awful how the manager didn’t move their butt out of their office for 3 minutes to listen to what I had to say. And even more rude than that was the fact that the manager was outside of their office and they didn’t want to talk to me – it wasn’t that hard to understand that someone who wears a t-shirt with the bookstore logo all over it was anything but a manager. But he looked at me to see who I was.
As you can notice, it was difficult for me to accept the situation as it was.
If I had accepted it, I wouldn’t have written about it right now. If I accepted it, I would have seen it as another situation where people are the way they are, not the way I want them to be, and moved on.
Acceptance is difficult because you have to accept everything, including the things you don’t agree with. And these things specifically, are difficult to accept because they are the opposite pole of what we believe in.
If I’m a good person and I treat people nicely, when something at the opposite pole happens, I’m losing my mind. But I learned that people are not like me and not everyone is a nice person, and this understanding helped me accept these kinds of situations.
The next day, after the situation with the bookstore, I felt better. I didn’t feel like I wanted to punch the manager and I calmed myself down. In the past, I used to keep these kinds of negative feelings in my body for weeks and I ended up hating people.
Instead, the more I accept people and things the way they are, the more balanced and present I am.
The main benefit: Less stress and anxiety
The more you accept things and people the way they are, the more present you are.
If you don’t accept someone as being rude and their rude behavior, whatever reasons they had, without having to understand it, you’ll start thinking about all the reasons why they were rude, you’ll stress yourself, doubt your value, dig for past experiences, and so on…
The things others do in relation to you, say more about them than they say about you. Everything others do in relation to you is not about you, but about them.
When you understand this, you get to detach from whatever happens in your life (in fact, it doesn’t happen in your life, but it generally happens), relax, and enjoy life.
When you set aside all the things that are teleporting you to your past or your future, you realize that here and now happens everything. And this everything has nothing to do with your desire of how things should be.
The difference between acceptance and resignation
“If I accept things the way they are, good or bad, whatever that means, how will we eventually live in a better world?”
Maybe you had such a question in your mind. For me, such a question makes a lot of sense and it represents the crossing point from resignation to acceptance.
When you resign, you end up disappointed about the way things are. That’s not acceptance. When you are disappointed, you haven’t accepted things the way they are and you want to change them. And because you can’t change them, you resign.
To accept things and people the way they are doesn’t mean you don’t live your life anymore. On the contrary, now that you know how things are and you have accepted the situation, you have the freedom to move as you please.
As I said, the acceptance that people and things are the way they are gives you the opportunity to make whatever sense of your experiences.
On the other hand, when you resign, your freedom of action disappears.
How to help your mind accept the things it can’t let go of?
The answer to this question is in the question.
When you become aware that your past can’t change, you let go of trying to change it. When you become aware that people won’t change just because you think they should, you let go of trying to change them.
When we talk about your experiences, it’s impossible to change something that happened, even if it happened 2 seconds ago. And when it comes to people, change always starts from the people who should change.
What you can do is to be a point of reference for them and inspire them with your actions.
More than that, you can change the way you look at whatever you experience. Do this and the things that you can’t change will change.
With love and optimism,
David
