As I am sure it’s abundantly clear, I am trying to wrap my mind around this whole radical acceptance thing. It’s not like anyone said I had to, it’s just that my mind keeps chewing on it, returning obsessively to it again and again. I have learned that when that happens I have to listen, or I end up driving myself, and those around me, crazy As we were on a family walk the other evening, I had what felt, initially, like a clarifying thought:
Radical acceptance is kind of like dealing with the weather. You can either “accept” what is, prepare for it accordingly, and then go about your day – or you can complain about it, allow it to bring you down, wallow, and refuse to leave your house (a valid life choice more often than not).
This makes a lot of tangible sense to me, and at the same time is not a perfect analogy (what is?). I mean the weather – as it is in the immediate moment and not taking into consideration extreme patterns caused by climate change – is the weather, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing, we can do to change it. The only thing we can control is how we react to it, and in the end accept its omnipresent power.
But therein lies the conundrum… With the exception of the hottest days of summer, I don’t have to mindfully practice radical acceptance when it comes to the weather. My thought being that people did not initially “create” the earth’s weather patterns. However, people did create things like racism, and poverty. People created sexism and homophobia. People created laws that suppress a woman’s right to choose and anti-trans legislation. People created every systemic issue that we are currently dealing with and will continue to deal with for the foreseeable future. And that is what is hard for me to radically accept. I mean, we got ourselves into this mess, why can’t we seem to get ourselves out of it?
I wonder often – like multiple times a day often – why it’s so effing hard to do the right effing thing. Not to actually care, but to actually accomplish what would equate to the eradication of even a single systemic issue. I wonder why it takes so much time and so much energy to move the needle even an infinitesimal amount. Why it take lifetimes and lifetimes.
Why?
Now even as I ask those questions I acknowledge that I am choosing to ignore nuance, frankly a grave error. I know that simplicity is a farce and that the path is rarely linear. However, I also know that thinking in these terms is an act of self preservation, and I know it’s a root cause of my suffering. I know all of this and yet the question of why still plagues me – still causes me to want to weep often and openly.
In her interview with Krista Tippett for On Being, climate activist Colette Pichon Battle advises us, “If you don’t cry deep, hard tears for the state of this planet and all of the people on it, you don’t yet understand the problem.”
And maybe that’s just where I’m at. I finally understand the problem – I think a part of me always has – and my tears are my offering for the state of things, and the roads I realize we are going to have to travel – for the journey’s that are to come – for all that we are going to lose and for all we have already lost.
In the next breath Battle goes on, “And so once you get to that place, the only thing that can bring you out of that kind of darkness is belief in something greater than yourself.”
For me, that’s reconnecting with the inherent divinity of the universe. The recognition that I am a part of a cycle that’s been taking place for millennia. So much of modern life takes us away from this, away from the earth, and, as a result, away from ourselves and each other. When I’m close to nature, present with my beloveds, when I’m moving slowly and looking around, the world doesn’t feel so dark. And I think that’s what radical acceptance is supposed to do. I think it is supposed to help us to face the present moment with compassion and with rationality. For we cannot fight the good fight if we cannot get up off of the floor.
I also very much like the idea that radical acceptance is an act of compassion for yourself. To this day, no one on this earth is meaner and more judgmental to me than I am to myself. Somehow I’ve always felt that the act of self-punishment works as kind of an atonement – the price I must pay for my participation. Because of course I am complicit, we all are.
And
through all of this exploration, something is beginning to emerge – an understanding that I am but one person – that I am not the whole world, and that while I certainly have a role in it, my actions and behaviors alone did not cause the world to be what it is.
And
I have also come to understand that I must grieve this fact, for it is a massive loss. If I control next to nothing, and the closest I can come to saving anything is myself, it means that I cannot save the world.
I know. I know. That doesn’t actually mean what it seems to mean. Just because I can’t save the world doesn’t mean I can’t do good things while I’m here. I know I can enact change. I know I can make things better – that I already am. It just means that I am going to have to stop living in the imagined future, and I’m going to have to figure out how to live in the present – day by day – bird by bird. I think this is the point of radical acceptance. I think…
And so, in an effort to honor living in the moment, I’ll end with a little ditty I wrote while being present one day:
A cotton ball cloud lingers over
Mt. Tom’s summit, just to the south.
Molecules gathering to say
hello and how are you and it’s so good to see you,
before going on their merry ways,
disbursing into the ether,
off into the infinity of the unknown –
where, after a millennia, they may meet again,
as themselves, or as something utterly transformed.
__________
Listen to this On Being episode. Listen.
I also found this verywellmind article on radical acceptance illuminating.