Acceptance

“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 is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake.”

There are a lot of things floating in my head at the moment regarding acceptance. One, how there is a balance between accepting things as they are and trying to change them. Acceptance is indeed the answer but it’s dangerous to associate acceptance with complacency. The idea, “Well that’s just the way things are. What can we do about it?” That is perhaps a blog for another time.

Mostly I want to talk about accepting divine guidance and accepting the path we are walking. There has been A LOT of resistance within me about my path and what the Universe has been communicating to me. There has been resistance because I was afraid, or didn’t feel worthy, or the whole thing felt unrealistic because I didn’t have any physical proof. I’ve been resisting, making myself miserable and frustrated. Now is the time for acceptance.

I’ve been standing in a place of indecision, waffling between two choices, and now I have tipped over the precipice. There is only so long I can ignore what the Universe is telling me.

I could reference my move to San Francisco here as an example but by now everyone knows that story by heart. (If you read AWIP regularly, that is.) Instead I will relay another one.

I skipped fourth grade, meaning I was younger than almost everyone in my class by the time I entered middle school. It also means I related better to the people in the grade below me because technically those were my peers. By the time I reached senior year of high school, I was the intellectual equal of my classmates but not the emotional equal. In short, I wasn’t ready to leave home. I wasn’t ready to leave the comforts of mommy and daddy and venture off on my own. It didn’t occur to me to take a year off; instead I decided the best solution was to go to UNC Chapel Hill, a school roughly 2.5 hours away. My brother went to school there, it was close to home, and it had a journalism program. Never mind I hated UNC from the minute I visited. Never mind all the times I went to yearbook camp there in high school and felt it wasn’t a good fit because it was too big, too provincial, and in the South. I went against my intuition because I was scared. And I paid for it.

I packed on 20 pounds while I was there and sunk into a deep depression. So deep I had fleeting thoughts of suicide. And you know why? Because I went against my very essence, of what I knew to be true in my heart: that I wouldn’t like UNC. Some people would say to just accept it, make the best out of being there. To cherish what I had and dig a little deeper to find my niche. I refused. Instead I trusted my intuition, my heart, and I got the hell out of there. I moved back to Charlotte, my hometown, for the second semester of my freshman year and then I transferred to American University in Washington, D.C. where I graduated from. It was a great decision. I (mostly) loved AU, not so much the school but the people I met there and the city. Instead of accepting my situation as it was, I instead accepted the divine guidance I received. Instead of accepting that I made a choice and the end, I was stuck at UNC, I allied myself with what my heart told me.

When people talk about acceptance they seem to leave that part out. I’m obviously all about self-acceptance, but I also think divine acceptance is important. You’ll be much happier if you accept what the Universe is conveying, that’s for sure.

I dream of a world where we accept what we know to be true. A world where we cherish the divine guidance we are given and let our hearts lead the way. I dream of a world where we rise up to meet our destinies. A world where we take inspired action along the way and leave the rest up to our higher power.

Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.