ACCEPTANCE IS KEY
“Think of people like flowers. Roses are beautiful, but they have thorns. You have to be very careful before you touch thistles, but even weeds are healing plants.” (Swami Sivananda Radha Time to be Holy)
Lately I have made myself homesick by using a screen saver app that posts a random selection of people from my photo archives, some that go quite far back in time. This morning I was treated to a candid photo from several years ago, featuring a young grandson in a rather hostile pose. Normally I try to preserve the happy-face photos that one sees on family holiday greetings, but I’ve taken so many of the grandkiddies that some of them will inevitably be captured in boredom, anger or simply a goofy mood. (One such photo features a grandchild rolling his eyes back as if having a seizure, which creeps me out whenever I see it, but it’s hard to find and delete the actual image).
Many of the photos remind me of our now teenaged grandkids at a time when they were sweet and cuddly and virtually worshipped their grandfather and me. And when they never thought to lip me off! Seeing such before-and-after photos of our grandkids reminds me that whatever stage they’re now in will also, inevitably, pass. This makes it easier to forbear when one or two of them are being royal pains in the…tuchus.
A word closely related to forbearance is acceptance, and in it’s more sublime form, we have equanimity. Perhaps these are sequential steps along the evolutionary journey. Forbearance implies a stoic, stiff-upper-lip attitude that is only apt to hold for so long. When something comes along to trigger that pent-up frustration, anger or resentment, we risk blowing up at some relatively innocent “victim”. It’s called taking hostages. In fact, I gave someone a taste of that today, sad to say.
Having the humility and self-awareness to accept these irritations as necessary to my spiritual growth can be a bitter pill to swallow. When one can say “thank-you” for such unsolicited (read unwelcome) sources of learning, one will have come a long way towards self-mastery. Which is the point of leading an examined life.
In her chapter titled “Getting (I typoed “Gritting”) Along With Others” in Time to be Holy, Swami Radha offers the following:
“There really isn’t anything or anyone absolutely bad or negative, and nobody benefits from your effort to understand that, except you. It helps to remember that each one of us is not an island, and that we have our seasons, and our ups and downs. Life is not just a straight line. It’s a wave. Sometimes you are on top of the wave, sometimes you have to go to the bottom, and then you have to make sure you have enough momentum to come up again on the other side.”
In an ideal world, forbearance evolves into acceptance and acceptance evolves into the more steady state of balance and harmony that I associate with equanimity. Conversely, the degree to which I can maintain a state of equanimity is a measure of how far I have come in accepting myself and others.
In Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness: the Revolutionary Art of Happiness, equanimity is said to be the most essential of the four brahma viharas or “sublime states of mind” to which Buddhist seekers aspire. The first three virtues consist of metta (gentle friendship), sympathetic joy (celebrating the good fortune of others), and compassion (walking with others through their sorrows); while the fourth, equanimity, is described as a “spacious stillness of the mind, a radiant calm that allows us to be present fully with all the different changing experiences that comprise our world and our lives.”
Equanimity is something I aspire to but am a long way from making a steady state, so today I’m setting my mental compass on ‘acceptance’. With my word of intention for 2024 being ‘trust’, I am doubly equipped to deal with the hiccups that presented themselves this week, as furniture that was ordered months ago finally arrived but was the wrong quantity, colour, shape and size. Perfect, I thought! I can accept that this too shall pass, and trust that we can rectify this first world problem. Would I prefer not to have to do that. Absolutely. But personal growth is about dealing with the situation in which I find myself and doing my best to problem-solve and move on, without blowing up or taking hostages.
If life were always easy there’d be no need to work on myself, no incentive to evolve at all. Difficulties and dissonances are catalysts for leading an examined life. As Swami Radha asks:
“Can you put yourself on a course of evolution and cooperate with it, not leaving it to chance – wondering, will it work, will it not work? Can you take matters into your own hands and direct your life so that you can say, “Living is a particular art and I have made the best of it.”?”
Can I? It’s worth a try!