Developing your collective core of acceptance

All we have is this moment and our attitude toward it.

It’s too late to add anything to make it better. Despite our stubborn demands that life comply with our preconceived version of how it should be, whatever is happening right now, this is it. This is as good as it gets.

One of the mantras that helps me practice this principle is the simple and gentle phrase, here we are.

Saying these three words, out loud, standing next to another person, grounds us in the fertile soil of acceptance and connects us intimately to each other.

Saying these three words reminds us that no matter what herculean effort we made to control life, no matter how many expectations we had about how things could have or should have turned out, no matter how deep the dislocation between our present state and what we hope will make life easier, well, here we are.

This moment is going to be what it is. There’s no failure and there’s no mistake, we both live here, and whatever happens, happens.

Xavier has a cool paper on the topic of metaphysical realism, where the authors break down the philosophical and interpersonal implications of this mantra:

Here we are is a phrase that bespeaks a relational expanse in which you exist, we exist, as well as a third, for the field in which the here lies, it binds us into a we. Within this meeting ground, this zone of adhesion, we breathe intersubjectively the native air. In all of these situations the encounter does not take place in each of the participants, or in a neutral unity encompassing them, but between them in a most exact sense, in a dimension inaccessible to them alone. The process consists of a gradual unfolding of prior unity. Concrete acts of experiential intercourse occur, and we become simply us. We can imagine no contact more real and more thrilling than this.

All together now, here we are.

It’s a beautiful practice for developing our acceptance. And not just as an individual, but collectively.

Because that’s the only way we successfully stumble through this circus of a world.

By activating the collective involuntary nervous system between each other.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What do you say to yourself to remind yourself that you are not a god?