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Today's
Meditation:
It's kind of
funny how you can tell a person that they need to accept a
situation, only to have them become belligerent and say
something like, "There's no way I'm going to accept
this!" The truth is, though, that we have to
accept things that actually are reality-- we don't have to
like them, and we most certainly can do everything we can
to change a situation that we don't like, but until we
accept that things are as they are, there's absolutely
nothing that we can do about anything.
Accepting
something simply means acknowledging that something is as
it is. It doesn't mean that we approve of it, and it
doesn't mean that we're not going to try to do something
about it. If I'm failing a class, then I can't do
anything to change that situation until and unless I
acknowledge and accept the fact that I'm failing. If
I get laid off (and it has happened), railing against the
situation and denying it won't help me a bit. But
once I accept the fact that I am, indeed, jobless, then I
can work towards doing something about the way things are.
I
think that the change that Katherine talks about below
comes from our perception of the situation. We're
likely to deny something, or that something has a hold
over us, as long as we don't accept something as it
is. But once I accept something exactly like it is,
my perception changes-- it no longer has any hold over me,
and I can deal with it much more effectively when I'm
dealing with something that I perceive accurately.
How can I improve something that I don't even see clearly?
I
want to keep working on my ability to accept things as
they are. I want to work with my students as the
people they are, good and bad, and not try to deal with
them as I wish they were (though there's something to be
said for treating them as the people they are going to
grow into being, but that's a different topic!). If
something bad happens in a relationship, I need to deal
with that something from a place of acceptance, not
denial, if I want to work towards fixing it. When I
accept life as it is, I can move through life without
facing the closed doors that my denial tends to create.
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