Welcome to That’s Philosophical, a newsletter that will keep you warm this winter. Once a week, I send you inspirational ideas to take a break in a messy world.
You can read the web version here.
In most situations, we are just reacting to whatever is happening to us. Acceptance is the way we can let go and see it from a fresh perspective.
If we try and accept the situation as it is, we are freeing ourselves from so much pain. The only thing you can do after a bad event is to accept it or keep thinking about it through your emotions. Until you accept it.
If people hate us, if we hate them, if we had a terrible day, if we lost our phone or we lost our leg, the only option we have is to accept, see what we can learn, and move on.
The choice
“When you are alone, you should call this tranquility and freedom and when you are with many you shouldn’t call this a crowd, or trouble or uneasiness but festival and company and contentedly accept it.”
- Epictetus
You don’t go to a music concert and feel frustrated about being one of the five people in a square meter. You don’t because you expect it to happen and you can’t do anything about it.
I hate crowdness and especially standing in lines with many people. I get easily irritated when I see too many people walking near me. But once I let it happen, I don’t care anymore (with occasional fails). Try to get into the mindset that it’s pointless to complain if you can’t change it.
Even if you failed and let your emotions out, you can still learn from this to change your response in the future.
You can choose to suffer, or you can choose to accept, move on, and enjoy life.
Of course I found the link to Buddhism
According to the second noble truth of Buddhism- desire is a root of all suffering. And desire is when you want something that doesn't align with the reality- lack of acceptance. We are not satisfied when we want the reality to be different. We don’t want to accept it as it is.
Accepting the reality requires a great deal of appreciation too. Being thankful for what you have in your life will make it more enjoyable because of just noticing these little things. Slowing down, rather than chasing something that will come next.
“Studies show slowing down, being mindful, and experiencing and expressing appreciation will work. By doing it and focusing on it, neuroscience demonstrates new neural connections are made and strengthened. This makes it more likely to occur in the future.
As neuropsychologists are fond of saying, “Neurons that fire together, wire together." Over time, you’ll find yourself happier, calmer, and experiencing more joy. It’s science.”
Acceptance = Stagnation?
Some think that acceptance is about being passive and not moving on. This might be true, in fact, the only thing that kept humans going and innovating is dissatisfaction with a world as it is. However, humans desired and changed whatever was under their control, so acceptance is not a path to stagnation.
Jon Kabat-Zinn’s explains this in Coming to Our Senses:
“Acceptance doesn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, mean passive resignation. Quite the opposite. It takes a huge amount of fortitude and motivation to accept what is — especially when you don’t like it — and then work wisely and effectively as best you possibly can with the circumstances you find yourself in and with the resources at your disposal, both inner and outer, to mitigate, heal, redirect, and change what can be changed.”
The Takeaway
How to live a happier life? One of the answers that come to mind is to reduce the number of negative events. But how do you do it? Avoid life? Then what’s the point of living?
Perspective is the ultimate solution.
Even though nothing in reality changes, you are still surrounded by screaming kids, your attitude to the situation helped you accept it and move on without wasting energy on resistance.
Our default response to unpleasant situations is always negative. Try to change this and take it in your own hands. If two of the most influential philosophies in history talk about this, there has to be something in it.
“God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.”
Thank you for taking a break, see you next week!