Acceptance

Acceptance

We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased.

Pema Chödrön: Living Beautifully

Throughout our lives we are confronted with situations, people and things that are not as we’d like them to be. Often we’re struggling a lot until we finally learn to deal with them and (hopefully) accept them. So much wasted energy!

I feel that the older I get the more I know how to accept the “unwanted” things in my life, but one big challenge remains – the physical and mental decline connected to high age. I can follow the process with my elderly friends: some seem to have gracefully learned to live at a slower pace, in smaller circles, but some struggle with the fact that there are many things they cannot do anymore and they resent Life for depriving them of former pleasures.  It is a great learning to see these different approaches – and a great incentive to work on “embracing the open-endedness of the human situation”, as Pema Chödrön so beautifully puts it.