Accept Now or Accept Later

Beat The Rush

In life, there are many things that happen which we find intensely frustrating. This happens particularly in interpersonal relationships. People may criticize us unfairly or harshly. They may ask unreasonable things of us. They may be inconsiderate toward us, or act in a million other ways that we find unpleasant, that disagree with our values, or thwart our hopes and desires.

The simplest, cleanest, and most profound way to relate to someone behaving toward us in this way is a medicine that applies not only to unwanted interpersonal events, but actually to any unwanted event, which is to accept it completely.

Accepting it completely doesn’t mean putting on a false exterior. It doesn’t mean pretending to accept it and smiling nicely. It doesn’t mean wishing we could accept it, and judging ourselves for how we really feel.

Complete acceptance simply means actually accepting it with no resistance. Here is the easily overlooked key point though: it also means accepting the way we feel about it. The reason we also have to accept how we feel about it is that how we feel and what it means to us are also part of the whole event that we are processing as stress. If we didn’t feel badly about the event, there wouldn’t be anything to accept. This is a subtle point that we can easily miss.

If the way a person acted or the thing that happened was not upsetting to us, there would be nothing to accept. It wouldn’t even register. The event that’s causing us difficulty and the event we actually have to meet is not the fact that someone spoke to us harshly, or that our hopes or desires were disappointed in some way, or that something injurious happened to us. What we have to accept is that something we don’t like happened to us, and we feel a reaction on the spectrum from mild tension or aversion all the way up to panic and rage.

What we have to accept is that something damaging, injurious, painful, unjust, or even catastrophic happened to us. Of course, all of these words are still perceptions, still ways of labeling an event and not the event itself, but that’s the key point. What we need to accept is not just that something happened, but that it was an event we are reacting to painfully. This means it’s essential that we accept our initial reaction to the event as well, not just the mere “external event.” In other words, it’s essential that we accept the initial meaning of the event for us too.

When I overlook this point, I tend to be confused as to why I’m unable to accept what’s happened and why I’m still struggling with it. The reason is that I don’t accept how I am initially reacting about the event, and this continues to feed a level of struggle in the mind.

Once we’ve accepted not so much the event, but our initial reaction to the event, our system can calm down and more options become available to us.

The way we usually respond, however, is to become distraught, averse, anxious, or angry, and maybe to spend time ruminating about possible responses. Maybe we actually reach out and talk to the person, which, although it occasionally results in greater understanding and substantive change, more often results at best in the other person promising to make changes they actually won’t make, and at worst in them becoming defensive or angry and us becoming entangled in an exhausting struggle with them.

Most often when we do not accept that this unwanted event has happened, the trajectory is that we struggle with ourselves and possibly with other people until we run out of energy for that struggle and come, ironically, to the endpoint of: acceptance.

This is the very endpoint we could have reached at the beginning, saving ourselves a lot of stress, wasted time, and wasted energy.

There is a brilliant apocryphal story about Alexander the Great which Plutarch tells, which was popular in the ancient world. In some versions Alexander is talking to the Cynic master Diogenes, and in others he is talking to an Indian gymnosophist (i.e. a yogi) — an interesting connection — who asks him what he plans to do after his next conquest. Alexander says that he will then conquer another territory and expand his power further, and the dialogue continues until there is nothing left for Alexander to accomplish. “What will you do then?” asks the sage, and Alexander responds, “Then I will sit down and happily rest.”

“Then why don’t you just do that now?” asks the philosopher.

Far from being a trite game on the part of the philosopher, this anecdote has deep implications one could spend a lifetime mining.

Acceptance is not, I should say, the same as doing nothing. Many unpleasant events are authentically out of our control, or there is little we can do about them-- but on the basis of acceptance, we can often see clearly what we actually can do and do it. This aligns with what I've written about elsewhere as the difference between thinking about a problem and dealing with it.

Later, when free of the emotional charge Tibetan Buddhists call shenpa, one may choose to do something, and when it comes out of a sense of cool wisdom, it is likely to go much better. Accepting something frees up our mind to see if a response is actually needed, and what a response beneficial for everyone involved might actually be. Even better, a natural, calm response often happens spontaneously without the need for further analysis and rumination.

This essay was written entirely with natural intelligence. AI tools may have been used for grammar, spell check, or research.

Photo by Kelly : https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-pile-of-papers-2928232/