No More "Should Be's"

If you can accept the flow of life and give in to it, you will be accepting what is real.  Only when you accept what is real can you live with it in peace and happiness.  The alternative is a struggle that will never end because it is a struggle with the unreal, with a mirage of life instead of life itself.    -Deepak Chopra

Where do we get the idea that life "should" unfold in certain ways?  How do we come to think that our actions should have certain results, and that other results are somehow "unacceptable"?  It seems pretty clear that as we grow up, we're taught some things that simply aren't true, and we're left to make our own conclusions as to how life works.  We're also taught that control is very important, and that we should have control over our lives if we're to be successful.  Unfortunately, though, we seem to have been taught incorrectly and inaccurately, and many of us have reached a point at which we're unable to accept things that affect us strongly, and we cause our own misery--and can make other people miserable--by refusing to accept certain things.

I just read a very long article on a couple whose son is gay.  They spent years trying to "deal with" this "problem," rather than accepting him as he was.  During those years, they isolated and alienated their son, and they were constantly stressed out and unhappy because of this glitch in their lives.  After all, their son was supposed to grow up, get married to a nice woman and provide some nice grandchildren, wasn't he?  And since their expectations weren't being met, they refused to accept the truth that was there right in front of them.  And because they were unwilling to accept that truth, they spent years being very unhappy people.

I admire this couple, though, because they did eventually accept their son.  And not just that, but they started support groups for people in similar situations, helping them to accept something in their lives that they hadn't expected or foreseen.  And their acceptance, unfortunately, was a mixed blessing--they were able to re-establish a strong relationship with their son, but many of the people that they knew--and especially people from their religion--started to reject them because they were no longer rejecting their son and his supposed "deviant" sexuality.

And we don't even need to get into the discussion of what's right and what's wrong as far as sexuality is concerned.  The simple fact of the matter is that people are as they are, and we can either accept them and be a friend to them, or keep them out of our lives.  It's complicated, though--my brother was a very violent alcoholic while he was still alive, and the question I had to ask myself was whether or not I wanted him to be a part of my life.  Should I accept him as he was, or accept the fact that his violence made him a danger to both my wife and me?  I went with the latter because I had spent my whole younger life growing up with a violent alcoholic as a father, and I didn't want to continue dealing with an alcoholic in my life.  And I certainly didn't want my wife to have to deal with that sort of thing, either.

So I accepted his alcoholism, and I accepted the fact that his lifestyle made him completely incompatible with our lifestyle.  As painful as it was, I accepted the fact that I basically had to keep my brother at a distance if I was to have peace in my life (my mother wasn't able to accept that fact, and she went through a lot of hell over many years because of it, unfortunately).  And because of my acceptance of a situation--instead of trying to change it, or change his behavior--I was able to find some peace and also keep my wife and me safe when he happened to be drinking heavily when we lived near him.

Deepak calls it a "mirage of life," meaning that we see what we think life should be or could be, and we want to make that a reality rather than accepting the reality as it is.  The mirage for me would have been to think "I can have a great relationship with my brother even though he gets drunk often and threatens people."  It couldn't have happened, though--he kept on drinking heavily until he died, and he didn't let anyone get close to him.

I had a friend once who got laid off from a job of thirty years.  He didn't whine or mope, though, and he never said "That's not fair."  Rather, he accepted his new situation fully, and he and his wife sold their home and moved to a place they had always wanted to live, and they ended up quite happy, enjoying their new lives in their new home.

It's easy to start thinking, "This is how life should be."  It's easy to start trying to make things different than they are because after all, if we can change this person or change this situation, then everything will be just fine."  Right?  Personally, I really love the perspective that Lao Tzu offers us when he tells us that accepting life as it is, is one of the most important steps that we can take to put ourselves in tune with life (or the Tao).

What is real is simply what is.  Much of what is bothers us, concerns us, frustrates us, annoys us, frightens us.  But we'll never be able to deal with what is until we accept what is, and until we allow it to be what it is without condition.  We may want to change what is, but even then, we can change nothing until we accept completely what it is.  And that is a challenge that's well worth the effort, for as Deepak says, our peace and happiness are at stake.

Running through Pain--A Paragraph a Day

 One of my New Year's resolutions is very simple:  I want to post a paragraph a day here on this blog, about things that are actually a part of my life and my living.  Sometimes the thoughts and ideas here are far too abstract, and they get a bit difficult to continue, especially after more than twenty years of keeping it up.  So here's today's paragraph:

I went running today, and things were fine for the first ten minutes or so.  Then my left calf started hurting, as in pulled-muscle type of hurting.  I stopped when it started because the pain was pretty intense, but I was already more than a mile from home, so my options were to stop and walk home, or keep going.  I decided to keep going (and please note that almost every doctor in the world would advise against doing what I did).  Why?  Because I started running again and found a stride that allowed me to run through the pain--it wasn't pain-free, but it also wasn't getting worse.  I was able to go another forty minutes before I finished, and the calf hurts now, obviously because I continued running on it.  But there are a few truths that I've learned throughout life that allow me to keep running.  First, some things are going to hurt.  A run, a relationship, a heart.  Once we accept that there will be pain in life, pain doesn't have the strength it does otherwise.  Second, continuing on even though it's painful is a valuable trait to pursue in life.  We don't want to be stupid about it and hurt ourselves more--if it had been a different kind of pain or more severe, I definitely would have stopped and walked home.  But again, once we accept that there will be pain, pain means something else when it shows up.  Third, though I hurt now, I know something important:  I would be hurting now even if I had stopped and walked home.  The pain is there, and it would have been in any case.  Sometimes the best thing we can do is not let a bit of pain stop us, but to run through it and keep doing what we're doing, even if it hurts.  We will hurt.  The question is whether or not we allow that hurt to determine who we are and what we do.

It Is What It Is: Accepting Life Fully

 "Acceptance" is one of those words that many of us seem to have problems with.  We like to "accept" on condition, which really isn't acceptance at all.  It's kind of like love in that way--we give our love freely to those who meet our standards or conditions, but we hold it back from people who don't.  We like to say that we accept life as it is, accept people as they are, accept situations as they are, but putting acceptance into practice is much, much different than truly accepting anything.

If I want to accept a person exactly as they are, then I can't impose conditions on that acceptance at all.  I can't say, "I like him, but I don't want to get together with him because of who he voted for."  We can't say, "You're a great person--once you learn some better manners, I'll be interested in seeing more of you."  We can't accept life as it is if we constantly look for the problems in life.  "I like living here, but it rains too much."  If we lose our jobs for some reason, the very first step that we have to make is too accept the loss, for nothing else can come of the situation until we do accept it.  Even if we were fired for unfair reasons, we can't fight the firing until we actually accept the fact that we have been fired.

Acceptance is a letting-go process.  You let go of your wishes
and demands that life can be different.  It's a conscious choice.
-Gary Emery

When we accept things as they are, we contribute greatly to our own peace of mind and peace of heart, for our acceptance frees us--we have no need or desire to have to make changes to anything.  It is what it is, and it's not our responsibility to improve or fix it.  And since most of our efforts to change things or people or situations to meet our personal criteria end up failing, anyway, that freedom is very welcome to us.  We're free to enjoy things as they are rather than spending our time wishing they were something else.

It's very important that we remind ourselves constantly that we weren't placed on this planet in order to change other things and people in order to make them what we think they should be.  We cannot learn from other people unless we accept them as they are.  We cannot be at peace with situations unless we accept them as they are.  We cannot reach our full potential until we accept ourselves as we are.

Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not
mean running away from the struggle.  On the contrary it means accepting
it as it comes. . . .  To accept is to say yes to life in its entirety.
-Paul Tournier

Of course, acceptance of the way things are doesn't necessarily imply approval.  I may accept someone's drug addiction because the person simply is a drug addict, and I can do nothing to help that person until I acknowledge and accept that fact.  When I accept that truth, I can act accordingly--this is not a person I would put in charge of anything important or have babysit my kids.  And it's not until that person accepts his or her own addiction that any true change can be made.

Accepting life doesn't ever mean that I refuse to try to change things for the better.  It means that I've done my best to see things as they are, and I'm willing to let life and other people do their own things without interference or help from me.  It's a freeing tendency, one that allows us to go on with making our lives the best they can be without feeling obligated to fix things for everyone else.  You are as you are, and that's just fine.  I may not want to spend much time with you because of the way you swear or the way you tend to insult other people, but that's fine.  I can tell you that straight out:  "I like you, but I try to avoid that type of talk because it offends me," and then let you choose whether or not it's worth it to you to tone down the language in order to spend more time with me.  I've made my choices based on accepting who you are, and now you have a chance to make your own choices.  I'm not trying to change you, but my acceptance of you shouldn't make me have to endure behaviors that make me feel awful.

I truly do believe that accepting life as it is and people as they are is one of the most important keys to living life fully.  When we do learn to accept life, accept others, and accept ourselves fully and unconditionally, we lose a lot of self-created stress that comes about because we think we need to control life and control people and control situations--and that's a thought that dooms us to failure and extra stress, because we weren't put here to control things--we're here to learn from things as they are, and to get to know them and love them as they are.

I accept life unconditionally.  Most people ask for happiness on condition.
Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition.
-Artur Rubinstein

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