The Power of Acceptance
“God grant me the serenity…”
I’m sure you’ve heard the rest, maybe know it by heart, maybe said it to yourself in chaotic or dark moments. The first step in this prayer or intention is acceptance. Accept the current set of circumstances, so that you then have the ability to assess what you clearly have the ability to change, and what might seem out of your immediate locus of control.
It’s a good place to start. It can calm your nervous system and brain chatter. But acceptance doesn’t mean giving up or stopping there.
Acceptance means taking stock of the situation and not fighting it. Instead of judging it or having a strong emotional reaction to it, take a deep breath. Stop arguing with yourself or others about how it “should” be. You can easily argue that you’re right about how it should be. But being right won’t really help you. It just keeps you stuck fighting an illusion. How it “should” be is a distraction. It is different from the reality you are actually facing.
It’s like putting on glasses. Your vision is now clear. What you couldn’t really see before, because it was blurred by emotion or fantasy, you can now see clearly. You can take the glasses off and imagine what you saw previously, but you know now it wasn’t actually real.
Acceptance, along with awareness, sets the stage for creating change. You can’t change what you can’t see. You can’t change when you’re fighting for it not to be true, no matter how righteous your anger is or how right you may be.
It allows you to take back your power in the situation and no longer be a victim of your circumstances. When you fight with reality, you are taking a victim stance and limiting your options for actions. You will always lose when you fight with reality. Only by accepting reality can you hope to win, and you may have to change the rules and your definition of winning to do so.
It doesn’t mean you think everything is ok the way it is. It just means that you see the situation for what it is. Then you can start working to change it, to take different action. Action that will help you create the experience that you want rather than what you don’t.
Sometimes that means choosing between options that you wish were different because you see them as not optimal. But when you fight with reality you are barred from actual choice. You don’t get to choose that things would just be different. But you can take action towards different futures.
For several years I completed the last 100 km of the Camino de Santiago in Northwestern Spain, first as a participant and then as a leader. Walking along the ancient paths, you get a sense of being part of history and part of the human experience of going on pilgrimage, which humans have done all over the planet since the beginning of time.
One of the highlights of the last several years has been stopping at a 350-year-old manor house, on whose land the original Portuguese Camino route traversed. On a particular trip, we had been asked to walk together by our tour guide, so we could all meet around 1 pm for the tour.
I got there just after 1 pm with most of our group. We were missing two people, one of the other leaders and one participant. Rather than one of our Galician guides going to get them, we waited. For 40 minutes. Until they arrived at the spot.
While we waited, I took stock of the time, the fact that we still had half the day’s walk ahead of us, and how much time we were likely to spend at the manor house, and I grew angrier and angrier.
I like walking in the morning, the earlier the better. On this trip we had started each day later than in prior years. So most days we were walking into the most heated part of the day. I also don’t like taking a break in the middle of the day for lunch or some other extended time. It’s challenging mentally and physically to then start up again for me personally.
This prolonged wait, followed by what I knew would likely be a 2-hour visit at the manor, and then having to start walking again after 3 pm with 6 more miles to go that day, was making me very angry.
As I watched my angry thoughts, I realized, I was fighting with reality, willing it to be different. I was angry at the people who hadn’t followed instructions and the guides who didn’t go get the tardy walkers. I was angry that it was going to be so late to have so much walking left to do.
Then I remembered that I had a choice. I could keep being angry about a reality beyond my control, or I could see if there was a different choice to make that would improve my thoughts, my mood, and my experience.
And there was. I could decide to stop walking for the day right then.
Of course, most people want to walk the entire intended route, and as a recovering perfectionist, that was definitely my first inclination. But holding on to that original plan of needing to complete the day’s route was making me increasingly unhappy.
So I made a different choice. I decided I was done walking for the day. I changed from my hot boots into my comfy flip-flops, thereby committing to a different ending than I planned for that day.
And all my anger and tension just drained away. I had accepted my reality at that moment and allowed myself to see the other options available to me and chose an option that made me happier and my day better.
I still would have preferred to get started earlier, to get to the manor house sooner, to not have had to wait 40 minutes for the rest of our group. But those options were simply not available, as they lived only in a past that did not happen.
By accepting the present reality, I was able to drastically improve it in the moment. By implementing this lesson, I was able to see and pivot to better options than the ones most obvious to me.
That is the power of acceptance.
