How do you balance accepting situations without losing your will to strive and peservere against the tides of life?
How do you yield to acceptance without losing hope and grit to persevere?
r/AskWomen
How do you balance accepting situations without losing your will to strive and peservere against the tides of life?
Comments
Being diagnosed with a major depressive disorder means I need some extra help. So I take Wellbutrin for that.
I accept things beyond my control.
I will do what I can and what with things within my control.
Example1:
It’s raining cats and dogs at 5am,.. makes me want to be lazy and not do my daily run.
I cannot control the weather, but I can control whether I run or not. And if I choose to run, I will accept that it might be a miserable run, but to a degree I can still control and manage my attitude and outlook on going for this wet run.
Example2:
You lose a very close family member.
I cannot control life/death… To a certain extent, I also cannot control my natural emotions and feelings when I’m grieving. I have to accept their death and the finality of it… that I will be sad, angry, guilty and the host of different emotions and pains this brings me…
But I can eventually gain control of my perspective, emotions, and how I choose to look and think of death and grieving in general. I can choose to want to think of them fondly and happily (with time) instead of sadly and bitterly.
Obviously not going to be as easy as forcing myself to run in the rain in the morning… but also not impossible if I choose to (and want to) put my mind to it.
You can google “external and internal locus of control” or look into how to develop a strong internal locus of control.
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It’s simple, I’m running out of money.
I feel like people often pose hard work and acceptance of the inevitable against each other when they shouldn’t. To me, I feel like you should always strive and persevere and use your grit to seek the best possible life for yourself. Acceptance is about deciding when to pivot how you’re using that grit.
My dad passed away earlier this year after a long illness. I watched as he lost out on so many of the things that brought him joy in his life, and he faced those things with a level of grace and acceptance that anybody should aspire to. Like, he used to play piano and go out with his friends and eat crazy foods and travel the world. And he lost his mobility, so he couldn’t travel the world anymore, so he’d go out with his friends at restaurants. And then he couldn’t go upstairs to play his piano anymore, so he put an electric piano next to his desk and played that all the time. And he couldn’t really go out with his friend so much and even sitting at the keyboard took too much out of him. So he dedicated himself to listening to music, categorizing his music collection, picking the right songs for the right events. He DJ’d for a while, but he couldn’t really lug the equipment around, so he had my mom do it, and then he gave it up and instead ran a mindfullness meditation class over zoom, where he picked out all the music for the entire meditation, all centered around a theme or an experience he wanted everyone to have.
He’d often complain about other people he knew, who drew so much of their identity from the things they did, who fell to sadness and despair as they lost the ability to do the things that were so core to who they were. He was so so angry at Joe Biden for sticking through the presidency for so long, because he could see himself there, and knew that was someone he didn’t want to be.
My father never lost his grit. He never lost his determination to persevere in finding every moment of joy where he could get it. But because he never gripped to anything too tightly, he could use that grit to pivot. To find that joy in the places that were still available to him. In the last weeks of his life he curated lists of movies that my mom and I should watch with him, what streaming service you could find them on, which ones he thought would actually be good and which ones I could probably skip and he could just watch with my mom. When we planned his memorial service, we found piles of songs labeled “Play this at my funeral.” He was in such pain, so much suffering, but he had days filled with joy with his family right up to the end, in the hospital we had an hour long debate about if dogs wore pants how would they do it, on the back 2 legs or all 4.
Acceptance isn’t giving up. It isn’t just deciding to be ok with a life that sucks. It’s constantly making the choice “What is the best thing I can do right now, in this moment, to use the resources I have available to me to make my life as good as I possibly can, for myself and the ones I love?”