Letting go and acceptance

How often in your life have you use the words “if only…”? We all do it. If only we had been kinder, if only we had understood more, if only we had been paying more attention, if only we had taken another path. That ‘if only’ implies that we are unhappy with the outcome of something that has happened, so if we had done something a bit differently, the outcome would surely been more to our liking. But we really have no way of knowing whether that is true or not. Perhaps taking another path would have led us to a different outcome, but can we really be sure it would have been one more to our liking? Every life, every person has things that come to pass that are just too hard to accept, too unexpected, too awful, and it is then that the “if only” jumps to mind. And even those mundane parts of life that happen differently than we would have liked them to, are subject to the ‘if only’ yardstick. We put ourselves in the frame of ‘what might have been’ and fight heartily, so often until we wear ourselves out mentally and emotionally, and still nothing changes. ‘What might have been’ is the ghost that we fight when we are feeling inadequate, less than, vulnerable. ‘If only’ is that nighttime companion that we argue with when sleep eludes us and we find ourselves searching for something to pass the time until exhaustion or morning, whichever comes first. No matter where our ‘if only’ fantasies take us, we really cannot get there, and the fight, the passion, the struggles only leave us bruised and battered, with no more acceptable outcome. It is like sparring with shadows. ‘Accepting what is’ and finding a way to make that work in your life is the beginning of creating a brighter tomorrow. ‘Accepting what is’ is not the same as giving up or giving in, it is the beginning of wisdom. It can be the beginning of finding a creative way to solve the problem, or the beginning of learning to ask for the help you might need. It might be the beginning of recognition that a new path might hold a solution. And it is certainly the first step in seeing ‘what is’ in a new light, and perhaps finding something to appreciate in it. There are some people who subscribe to the philosophy that ‘everything happens for a reason’ and isn’t that a parallel to what the poet Ranier von Rilke said, that “out of every tragedy, there are the seeds of something wonderful and beautiful”. Since we are not usually saying ‘if only’ when something terrific and marvelous happens, it is important to build that muscle, that acceptance habit, in order to move ahead. Acceptance is not about giving up, it is about stopping the fight before we are battered and bloody. If we can learn to look for the reason, for the wonderful, then we have a beginning on the road of appreciating what is. So think about starting the New Year with letting go of what might have been, and accepting what is.