Thursday, April 21, 2016

#BlogExodus: Accept

"May God grant me the serenity to ACCEPT the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Acceptance is one of the hardest things that we must do. Part of being a part of a community is accepting the other people around us, not as who we want them to be, but how they actually are. No human is perfect. Not even the ones who we place on a pedestal.

Accepting ourselves is hard: it requires holding ourselves to a high standard while still keeping in mind that we are human. It requires accepting the fact that there we have feelings and sometimes those feelings may be complicated and not what we think that we should be feeling, but that's okay. There's a concept in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy that really relates to this: it's called radical acceptance. Radical Acceptance is the idea of accepting everything that happens as a thing that happened and everything that you are feeling as a thing that you are feeling and letting it be part of your life without feeling the need to judge yourself for it. This is a skill, that like everything else, requires practice. It requires practice to stop blaming the world for the final that got moved up two weeks or the fact that you broke your headphones two days before traveling and accept that those things happened. The only way we can actually deal with problems is if we accept that they are present beforehand. Accepting the reality of a situation turns a reactor into an agent. We now choose what to do.

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