And what happens if tomorrow never comes? If you never get your life back the way it used to be? Never get your health back. Your wealth back. Your love back. Whatever it is you lost back. What then? Can you let go of what was and accept your new reality?
Some things are easier to accept than others. If you lose your job you can always find a new one. As long as you have people around you who love you, the sting of a lesser career won’t hurt as much, should you need to accept a lower paying job. And if you lose the love of the people around you, you can, theoretically, always dust yourself off and put yourself out there to find love again. Easier said than done, but you can visualize a path there. But what about your health, which cannot be won back by mental shifts in thinking, no matter what the meditation and yoga gurus say? What happens when the form and function of your being is compromised to the point where you are but a shadow of your former self? How do you handle that?
I’ve had a lot of time to come to terms with that possibility these last four years, and while I’ll never be able to accept defeat, I have come to accept my current status. In fact, acceptance was the thing that started turning my health around. Once I stopped desperately seeking for that silver bullet solution that would return my body to its former health, I was able to take stock of where I was at and not panic so much about what I had lost. Acceptance allowed me to retain gratitude for what I still had.
We often treat acceptance like it’s a dirty word. A defeatist word. That by accepting your diminished health you are giving in to that which limits you. That you are saying no, you won’t be you again. This doesn’t sit well with anyone because we’re not programmed to take no for an answer, are we? But only when we fully accept reality can we find a proper path forward to alter it.
Accepting your health condition is not giving in to it. Rather, by squarely looking at it and acknowledging it, you are giving yourself a starting point for how to move forward. Maybe your health will never improve and maybe it will, but acceptance will allow you to ground yourself and decide where you go from here. Then you can decide how you’re going to fight and what kind of person you’re going to be during that fight. At the end of the day, it’s really how you should approach all of life’s fights, not just when you’re fighting for life itself. Acceptance is where the fight begins.
