Acceptance. It’s just fucking hard. Not just hard because it means tolerating things we don’t like, but because it feels weak. What am I supposed to do, just let things be? Yes. Yes, exactly.
“musturbation.” The faulty and damaging belief that things must be the way we want them, or must be the way we expected.
Note: I first encountered this from Ness Labs.
“You ought to be preparing yourself…to hear truths, which no inflexibility will be able to withstand,” James Madison once wrote to Thomas Jefferson.
stuff is going to happen to us in life. You gotta be ok with it. That which one resists persists, is the old proverb.
Do not seek to have events happen as you want them but instead want them to happen and your life will go well.
Note: A quote from Epictetus.
Acquiescence.
Note: the reluctant acceptance of something without protest: in silent acquiescence, she rose to her feet.
feras non culpes quod vitari non potest
Note: What can’t be cured must be endured. – Horace
Lincoln’s favorite saying was “And this too shall pass.”
“Evolution is necessarily slow since we resent it so,” Florida Maxwell Scott observed at the end of her life.
Schopenhauer quotes an analogy from the Roman playwright Terence when he says that “life is a game of dice. Even if you don’t throw the number you like, you still have to play it and play it well.”
You don’t have to like it to work with it—to use it to your advantage. But it starts by seeing it clearly and accepting it unconditionally. Amor fati— a love of what happens. Because that’s your only option.
The Stoics had another metaphor for what they called the logos or the universal guiding force of the universe. We are like a dog tied to a moving cart, they thought. We have two options. We can struggle with the foolish notion of control and dig our hind legs in, challenge every step and get forcibly dragged. Or we can go along for the ride, enjoy it and take our freedoms where they come.
Note: Logos/ Logikos (λόγος/ λογικός): reason or rational; the ordering principle of the cosmos. Logos spermatikos (λόγος σπερματικός) is the generative principle of the universe, which creates and takes back all things (see Marcus 6.24).
The world around you, it is what it is. The events that happen, they are what they are. The people in your life, they’ll do what they do. Accept them. Understand them. Empathize with them.