Accept Life's Challenges
If you will accept the challenges that come your way, you will always be a highly inspired and imaginative person. Discouragement will hardly ever touch you.
Discouragement comes when you refuse to accept the challenge. It is discouraging to have a problem you cannot accept.
Accept the problem and you move forward from discouragement to action.
Accepting the problem changes the nature of the problem. Now the problem is no longer an obstacle but a stepping stone.
With acceptance, you've stopped putting energy into the problem and are now investing yourself fully into the solution.
The secret is to be willing to do anything it takes to get above, go around, or go beyond the problem. If you are willing, then you will find a way. But first, you must be willing.
It sounds backwards, but acceptance of the circumstances you find yourself in allows you to change these circumstances. It's your resistance to those circumstances that makes them so solid and real. Stop resisting.
To resist something is to imagine that something over and over again with great emotional force. With your imagination, you hold that something in place by resisting it with fear and guilt. It's a tie that binds.
It takes humility to accept things as they are. Acceptance is a form of humility which stops you from resisting. Acceptance is a washing, a cleansing. You wash and cleanse yourself of whatever you can accept.
The fear that you will solidify things further by accepting things just as they are is not true. Acceptance makes you emotionally detached. Become too emotionally detached towards something and you ignore it to death.
In the end, it is indifference to a set of circumstances that takes the life out of these circumstances. But it is impossible to become indifferent towards something unless you accept it first.
When you become indifferent to a circumstance, you start to dissolve that circumstance and the effect it is having on your life. But don't try to become indifferent to the circumstance directly. Simple acceptance is all you need. Just accept the way things are.
Acceptance will put you in touch with a finer reality.
If you can accept a set of circumstances, you can imagine a whole new set of circumstances because you've surrendered the old circumstances to God. That's when the healing begins.
Be realistic. Say to yourself, ``I'm here where I am today but tomorrow will be very different.'' And then imagine just how very different tomorrow will be.
©Edward Abbott 2003