Some people think that accepting a situation means giving up, or giving in. Far from it.
When we don’t accept a situation we can be paralysed by pain, fear or anger, repeatedly. We can’t let it go. The causative event keeps replaying in our thoughts, causing our body to fill with fight or flight hormones, we get angry or frightened, over and over. This is bad for our mental health, and it sets the stage for imbalance in the chemical homeostasis of our body that can lead to disease. And as we know, the stress can also be stored deep in our core, bone deep.
To not accept something that has already happened is an exercise in futility. We can’t change it. We can’t go back to the way things were beforehand. We can acknowledge how that situation made us feel. We are human after all. Feel it fully and move through it. It is perfectly valid to grieve the loss of a loved one, for example. Maybe we regret some things that were said or were not said. But, it’s past now. Life is always best lived in the present. Grieving will give way to gratitude for the special memories that person has in your life.
We can also move beyond the initial bodily reactions that the events triggered in us. Did you know that the cortisol hormones that induce an anger response will actually be gone in 90 seconds? They’ll be flushed completely out of our system, if we just breathe and allow them to pass. This gives us time to pause and consider the situation. Unless the situation is immediately life threatening, if we react instinctively in a moment of high stress, it usually makes things worse. Most situations are not life threatening and if we give ourselves a few moments to calm ourselves, then an appropriate response will come - which may actually be no response, quite often. It requires great strength and presence to avoid the defensive, but ill-advised, quick retort.
Accepting the situation gives us great power. We now have three choices. We can change those things in our power to change to prevent a recurrence; we can accept that we can’t change much and decide to live with it; or we can exit the situation. All three of those choices are positive choices that we have the power to make.
Even if we choose option 2, to live with it, we still have choices over how we respond to what is going on. We may not like the situation, but we can choose not to be beaten by it. This was Viktor Frankl’s choice in the Jewish concentration camps. The German’s had made a prisoner of his body, but his mind was still his own. He retained the right to choose how to respond in his own mind, to the captors attempts to dehumanize him. He said “…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”.
Sometimes these seemingly terrible crux times in our lives are the catalyst for tremendous change for the better, for others, as well as ourselves.
I watched an interview recently with a lovely woman, Alison McLellan. In 1976 her 19 year old son suffered a brain injury. It changed both of their lives permanently, it could not be undone. She learned how to support her son the hard way, at a time when there was almost no support available for brain injury victims and their carers. However, rather than remaining isolated, she began a support group in her local area for others in the same situation. The need grew into the now national Brain Injury Association, a support and advocacy group. Alison took a seemingly devastating personal situation and transformed it into a whole life’s purpose in the service of others. She’s been nominated for Senior New Zealander of the Year.
Nietzche said “He who has a why to live for, can bear with almost any how.”
It begins from accepting this moment as it arises, pausing, and making positive choices, even when all seems bleak. Sure it may be ‘baby steps’ to start with, before forging a new way forward, sensing new opportunities for self-realisation as we go.
Acceptance of the present moment, purposely paying attention to it, as a daily practice, could be the beginning of something powerful and fulfilling for you too.
“Life can be frustrating and full of obstacles
with desires for a different life constantly disturbing your mind
or life can be fulfilling, full of opportunities
with a constant flow of gratitude for the gifts you have
and the only difference between them is acceptance.”
Steve Taylor, The Clear Light 2020
To accept the present moment is to accept life and experience it in its fullness. To be fully present does not require a lot of thought, in fact the present often goes a lot better without thought.