Acceptance is a simple word. Achieving it can be very complicated. All of us have struggled with accepting our selves, our loved ones, and the present circumstances of our lives. It is often a goal more easily voiced than attained.

Acceptance Isn’t Giving Up

Many people balk when they consider accepting something. The impatient part of us wants change and we want it NOW! Acceptance can sound dangerously like giving up, like resigning yourself to realities you frankly consider unacceptable. Should a person really accept, say being “overweight”? Accept your financial situation as it is? Accept a world where people are capable of terrible acts of cruelty and violence? The dilemmas posed by adopting an attitude of acceptance can be profound.

I am quick to point out that acceptance is not the same thing as resignation, which assumes that change is no longer possible. It is also the opposite of denial, which often evokes a flurry of activity designed to distract us from whatever problem is at hand. Acceptance requires a heartfelt engagement with the way things are. Rather than stifling change, it enables it.

Acceptance Means Being Kinder with Yourself

In my own life, trouble accepting my self and my circumstances has often revolved around not meeting goals in the time frame I’d envisioned: obtaining financial security, achieving success, finding love. Problems with acceptance can start early, and in the simplest of circumstances. I can still remember, at the age of ten, fretting on a Sunday night about how my weekend would soon be over and I wasn’t having fun! Nor could I think of anything fun to do. Utterly preoccupied with the ticking of the clock, I could only focus on how the last hours of my “freedom” were slipping helplessly away.

Lack of acceptance often propels us out of the present moment into regret over unexpected delays, past mistreatment, or worry over an uncertain future.

Acceptance is the Opposite of Bitterness

Charlotte Bronte once observed, “Life appears to me to be too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrong.”

Unjust things happen all the time. Some are only minor slights. Others are on a scale so large you can scarcely comprehend them. You may respond with anger, sorrow or bitter disbelief, but you will react. Yet it’s what you say or do after your first reaction that typically determines the shape of your future.

In my experience, acceptance involves acknowledging that there is both a great deal outside of our control and also a good deal within our power. It requires coming to terms with life as both difficult and energizing, dangerous and engaging, rewarding and unfair. Acceptance means making peace with the present reality of who and where we are—regardless of past regrets, future aspirations or present injustice.

Acceptance Can Prompt a New Beginning

As such, I prefer to think of acceptance as a starting point, not a destination. We are where we are. Wishing otherwise will not bring us a single step closer to our goals. But accepting the reality of our present life location can help us in making more effective plans for moving forward.

Reading this brief meditation won’t propel anyone into an attitude of enduring acceptance. It won’t magically make you come to terms with an often vexing and complicated world. But if you can acknowledge that you only possess as many insights as you have at this moment (and are open to considering a few more), you are already practicing the principle of acceptance.

We don’t have to like a situation, to accept it. But with acceptance often comes some peace of mind—a sense, however difficult, that what is necessary for the next chapter of our story is finally underway.

Mark Carlson-Ghost, Ph.D.

If you find it difficult to move into acceptance, you may be struggling with bitterness, a sense of anger hardened into a habit. It may be useful to read the beginning article of four on bitterness.

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