Acceptance is when you stop fighting things and just live with them
Lately, I am thinking about acceptance quite a bit. This is very hard for people like me who see themselves as constant doers, in motion, wanting to bring about change. Acceptance, if clearly defined, is the exact opposite to that, as we need to learn that we cannot change many things in the world around us and just have to live with them.
Acceptance, what does that really mean ? For many to even define acceptance proofs to be a difficult question. Acceptance for me means to stop fighting what we cannot change, to learn to live with the fact that some things are just as they are and rather than relentlessly wasting our energy to change them, we need to accept them and move on. Acceptance means to stop fighting and direct our energy somewhere else.
Especially for people that are constantly on the move and feel the need to achieve and bring about change, acceptance can be very difficult. It’s is hard for those individuals to just stand by and live with what they see without the desire to optimise, improve or changes. However, that’s is exactly what we are supposed to do when practising acceptance.
You might ask yourself now- but why is acceptance so desirable ? By accepting we can make headspace and capacity in our busy ways of thinking and going about love to focus on something else. If we keep dwelling on about the same things over and over again on top of everything else that comes out way, we will quickly reach our mental capacity and eventually break down. Once way of avoiding this constant feeling of being anxious and overwhelmed is freeing some of our headspace through acceptance. This will give us capacity for new things and to put our focus somewhere else. Acceptance therefore lets us move on rather than going over the same things again and again that we cannot change anyway.
Acceptance however is a skill to learn. It does not come easy to us. We can practice it by exercising some kind of mindfulness and taking breaks in our day to day life to really focus on what is important and reflect on what we can change and have a direct influence on and what not. The beauty is, once we can exercise some for of acceptance on certain things it gives us a great feeling of piece and calmness.
As an example, acceptance means we live with the facts that our partner is not a Monday morning person. Rather than dwelling on and on about the extra responsibilities we might have to take on, on a Monday morning, we can just accept it, talk about it with our partner and get in with it. Our partner might then do more later in the week. By accepting, we can move on and focus on something else we can change and influence for our family.
Acceptance is a skill. It means learning to life with certain things and knowing we hit a dead-end here that won’t change. Once we do this, imagine what we could do with that extra headspace we gained.
