Acceptance in the Here and Now

I noticed that I and a number of other people are having a hard time with life events recently. We will all have difficult times to deal with but how events affect us now and impact us in the long run depends on how we deal with them. If you’ve followed this blog for a while then you’ve probably read my thoughts on living in the now and how it affects your health, stress level, and just enjoyment of life. Well, the same kind of thing is key for dealing with hard times.

When we find ourselves in an emotional or difficult moment–whether it’s a bad injury, a deadline you’ve missed at work, or the loss of a loved one, one of the first things that comes to mind is wanting or wishing you could change the circumstances you find yourself in. There’s no point in doing this but we all do it just the same. If you hold onto those thoughts, you’ll just be torturing yourself which does you and those around you no good at all and can be harmful in the long run.

It’s true that some situations can actually be changed for the better, but, unfortunately, there are a lot of things you can’t change and some things we shouldn’t try to change. Sometimes trying to change the difficult thing we’re dealing with is just going to waste a lot of energy on a losing battle. Sometimes it can make something even worse.

So, the first thing you need to do with any situation is to accept what has already happened. The past cannot be changed. If you missed that deadline, well, you can’t go back and get the work done on time any longer, but you can move forward and get the job done as soon as possible or, if it’s just too late, put it aside and pick up the next most important task. If someone has passed away, celebrate who they were and how they have enriched your life while realizing and accepting that everyone will pass on and that it’s just part of this wonderful miracle of life we have been lucky enough to experience.

Accepting and living in the moment won’t make the stress or pain of what has happened go away completely and that’s okay too. Disappointment, pain, and sorrow are normal when things get rough. It’s an emotional reaction that we don’t choose. But we can choose how long we are going to dwell on it. Those emotions are a reaction to the circumstance, but the initial reaction is momentary.

So, go ahead and feel your emotions and accept them as normal and natural but let go of any attempts to control what has already happened. This will make it so much easier to accept difficult circumstances. When you do, it will reduce the emotional and physical pain and problems you’ll have while dealing with the situation.

That’s what it means to live in the now and accept and appreciate the moments we have, the good and the bad. It’s just not worth spending your precious time wishing things had been different. And it’s not worth your precious energy to try changing the present in an attempt to rewrite the past, no matter how bad an effect it has had on you and your loved ones.

So even though you can’t change the past, you can change the here and now and you can change what happens next. The only thing that can do this and can change how a difficult situation will affect you, is in how you deal with it in the moment you have, that moment of the here and now.

Keeping Your Mind in the Moment

Some very wise person once said, “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.”  I’ve thought about and written quite a lot about this thing called “living in the now”.  I think I keep writing about it because it motivates me to live in the moment more often. As you might have experienced, living in the moment is very hard to stay conscious of and to do on a frequent basis.  But if you concentrate and keep trying to live in the moment, you are likely to do more and more of it.  And yes, I think it’s a great idea to write that down as a goal because, as you probably know, if you commit your goals to paper or on your phone or computer, you are much, much more likely to do it.

In Ernie J. Zelinski’s great book, The Joy of Not Working, under a section titled “Mastering the Moment”, the author says, “In some cultures, a moment can last the entire afternoon. Activities have natural starting and ending times not dictated by the clock. People don’t limit their conversations to fifteen or thirty minutes. Conversations start when they start and end when they end regardless of the number of clocks in the immediately vicinity.”

He goes on to cite a study that I found really surprising, and even a bit shocking. The study and research showed that most couples in North America spend only about 18 minutes a week in real conversation.

Zelinski also noted, “Out of 500 people surveyed by World Tennis magazine in a sex/tennis pool, 54 percent said they think about sex while playing tennis.” Wow, I play a lot of tennis and I don’t think I fit at all in that 54% group. Those tennis players obviously haven’t learned to live in the now, and I am quite certain if they did, they would win a lot more matches. I wonder how many people think about tennis when having sex. I think that might make it much harder to finish the sex round.

Ok, next week I want to write more about Zelinski and give you a few quotes from him and this subject of “living in present moment”, or the way I say it, “living in the great right now”.  I am also, due to feedback from readers, going to move my blog from Friday mornings to Sunday morning. This should give you some time to really ponder the subjects I bring up. So, look for the follow-up to this post next Sunday!