marichiko

Yes, the ability to accept life as it is (including life's tragedies) is one aspect of enlightenment. But let's be real here, the vast majority of us have difficulty with the disappointments and set-backs of life. We are not enlightened beings. As master of the obvious, I have noticed this fact.

It is not a bad thing to search for cause and effect in what happens to us if we can do this with an open mind. For example, if you keep getting fired from jobs, it doesn't hurt to sit down and reflect upon this to attempt to discover the reason. We may decide that its because the "boss is always fucked" (in the immortal words of one of my friends) or we may notice that we have a habit of always coming in to work an hour late, so we decide that we'll start showing up on time, and, by golly, we don't get fired from our next job!

When it comes to relationships with other people, everyone seems to run into real difficulties with this "acceptance" issue. We want people to respond in ways that are favorable to us. We want everyone to like us, the teacher to give us an "A", te boss to give us a promotion, and the girl or guy of our dreams, not only to love us, but to be exactly the person we want them to be. Up to a point we CAN influence these things. If we are friendly and act with integrity, we'll have a better chance of having friends. If we work or study hard, we'll have a better chance of getting that "A" or promotion. But we can't force someone to love us and no one can change another human being.

When people get "stuck" in these areas, all too often they waste a lot of time and energy blaming the other person. A person stays on in a job where there's no chance of advancement because the boss's nephew is going to be given all the advances. Well you can stay in that job for years, bitterly complaining of favoratism or you can ask yourself why you seem to have a need to remain in a no win situation. You can go out with a guy for years even after he's told you he's not the "marrying kind" and hope you'll change his mind. You're refusing to accept the person for who they are in this case, and growing more bitter by the day, as your every attempt to bring him around fails. The mistake is in not accepting the person for who he is, and looking at yourself and asking why you have this need to chase after impossible dreams and tilt at windmills.

In situations like the examples above, acceptance is the first step toward taking personal responsibility for our own lives. Yeah, its too bad the boss plays favorates and its too bad the guy is a player, but after a certain point, we need to understand that we are signing on for these things by sticking around and refusing to accept the situation for what it is.

One of the biggest challenges of all is to accept the true tragedies that happen in our lives - a friend is senselessly murdered, our child is killed by a drunk driver, our spouse dies, we are diagnosed with incurable cancer. We can rail against fate and become bitter and shut down or we can redeem our suffering by allowing our broken heart to become an open one. We UNDERSTAND the suffering of others on its most intimate level, because we, too, have suffered. On one level we must accept the tragedies of our lives, and stop asking "Why me?" and ask "Why NOT me?"

Out of our suffering we may campaign for stricter enforcement of drunk driving laws and thereby save hundreds of other lives. We may become a bereavement councelor and help others with the pain of loosing a loved one; we can leave a trust fund dedicated to cancer research, so that one day others may not have to die of the disease.

But we won't be abe to do any of these things if we don't first accept the tragedy. The choice is ours.