All of us will get shaken by repeated threats to our established way of doing things.
And all of us will have to deal with changes that we don’t like.
What sucks is, simplicity will be in short supply. No matter how hard we work to make quick order of a complicated world that is full of shades of grey, life will probably still feel unfair, stupid and confusing. For longer than we want it to. God damn it.
Welshons writes about this experience in his book about the inevitability of unexpected, unwanted change. He says the reaction to anything in our universe that we don’t like, any resistance to change, so firmly entrenched in our minds, is what precisely what creates our grief. And we can either rail against that, or surrender to it.
As a stubborn aquarius who thrives on structure and resists change, this journey of acceptance has been an interesting one.
Who knew that acceptance over what you can’t control makes room for efficiency over what you can? Who knew that there is rarely some mystic rainbow that will wash away our woes? Who knew that every little act of surrender allows us to relax a little bit more?
Not me.
And yet, the practice of bringing acceptance into areas where it was painfully absent, often through daily mantras about trusting the process, life’s changes become substantially easier to navigate. Acceptance becomes the solid anchor in the sea of strangeness we call life. The existential plug that keeps our sanity from draining away.
Emerson was right when he asked, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past? Why should we put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?
Exactly of demanding simplicity from everything, let us acknowledge that we are complex and contradictory beings.
Instead of expecting the changes of life to escalate toward some ominous crescendo, let us accept all occurrences as though we ourselves have desired and asked for them.
LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Can you resist the temptation to simplify your existential complexities?
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Scott Ginsberg
That Guy with the Nametag
Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.
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