Accept Life As It Is

“It might not feel fair or right that life has to be so hard. But accepting the disorders that we or our children have—and finding the best solutions we

can for them and ourselves—is a loving choice we can make.”

Melody Beattie, Choices

Every moment of every day we have the ability to free ourselves from the unfairness of life by accepting reality as it is—not as we would have it be. Reality is simple to understand: Life is not now or ever fair to anyone all of the time and it never will be. And yet, so many of us enslave ourselves by complaining daily about how unfair life is in that we suffer from diabetes, or manic depression or obsessive compulsive disorder. Or in that we didn’t get the raise we thought we deserved, or that our special someone dumped us, or that the rain ruined our vacation.

Complaining strips us of all our power—mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. It drains us of vitality, exuberance and hope as it becomes a cage where we brood, ruminate and wallow in self-pity. Complaining is how we mentally and verbally fight what we cannot change. It is a mental-emotional-physical-spiritual cancer rooted in our inability to accept the unacceptable. And it  steadily grows in its malignancy as we focus all of our attention on it and trap ourselves under its ever-growing thumb. Before we know it, we have ruined our every opportunity for happiness by fighting reality and sooner or later we will find ourselves facing the ever-graying walls of depression.

 Every time we complain we make ourselves a victim of reality. Instead of complaining, we need to befriend reality. In doing so, we will take our power back from the unacceptable by making it acceptable. For example, if you’re having a bad bout with our obsessive compulsive disorder why fight it? There’s no sense in saying “Oh no, not today” or in fighting it. Rejecting reality simply empowers it. Accept it as it is. Befriend it. Be gentle with it and yourself. Surrender it to God and allow God to take charge. Then take positive action. Make sure that you’ve taken your medication and be willing to gently counter anything false the OCD is telling you. Allow it to have its say and then kindly dismiss what it’s telling you as untrue and move forward in your day being compassionate and understanding with yourself.

Acceptance is also the key if we’re on our vacation and faced with several days of rain. We have a choice: We can play the victim, complain and be miserable the entire time, or we can choose to chase after fun things we can do despite the rain. Maybe God is calling us to sing and dance in the rain with the person we love the most. Or maybe we need to take time to sit, enjoy a cup of coffee and observe how the azaleas or daisies are responding so beautifully to the nourishment that the rain is providing them. In doing so, maybe we’ll come to realize that our inner-life is also being nourished by the rain. But we’ll never know that if we sit all day and bitterly complain.

Life is about choices and it’s time we stopped making negative choices that trap us in the shadows of life. We need to learn to look to the positive, to accept what we cannot change, to take the necessary steps to make our lives better instead of playing the victim of life’s unfairness, and we need to always trust that God wants what’s best for us no matter what bad hand life has dealt us. If in the deck of life all we have in our hand is a deuce and a nine, that’s fine. Accept it. Then take some positive action. All it takes is one positive step forward to get the ten card we need to have the 21 we all desire. Take the risk and allow your soul to shine!