“And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation – some fact of my life – unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it supposed to be at this moment.” – The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, pg. 417
How many times have we been disturbed by everything and/or everyone around us? What has run through our minds as we’ve been bothered by situations that are not to our liking? Have we spent an inordinate amount of being unsettled by that which we didn’t find favorable?
Acceptance; it is the key to living a life of serenity. The situations we find ourselves in, even long after we are sober, can be less-than-favorable. We may object to the actions and/or ideas of those around us. The more we struggle against our self-imposed chains keeping us locked and bound to the discomfort of that which we are not in favor, the harder it is to have peace within our hearts, our homes, and in our interactions with others.
We must learn to find a way to accept that which happens around us, when those are situations over which we have no control. However, we need to find a way not to use the idea and action of acceptance to be our excuse in avoiding the taking of action. We can accept a situation and work, within a productive way, to facilitate healthy change. Whether the change happens or not, we are indebted to the idea of letting the results go. Letting the results be what they are, as long as we do the necessary work, is a very large part of what acceptance is all about. It’s not about shirking duties and shuffling feet through wet sand; it’s about putting effort into the next right action and being able to stay emotionally separate from the what-happens-next.