Accepting Reality
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Learning to deal with life as it is
Working to accept the reality of life means you prefer to try to deal with whatever comes your way. You won’t make the mistake of pretending things don’t happen, and hope they’ll just go away. Nor will you resort to superstitious actions to influence the future in your favor. Coping with your life by being actively accepting of reality is useful and helpful. You know that you can’t change reality, but by accepting it you can find ways to live productively whatever your circumstances.
If you don’t learn to accept reality you are open to the vagaries of fatalism, magical thinking (or superstition), and wish fulfilment. All these responses to life suggest a basic assumption of powerlessness where you are either unwilling or unable to do anything to affect the way you live your life.
Acceptance is not powerlessness
If you believe in fatalism, the doctrine that all events are predetermined, you won’t even attempt to understand what is happening. If you are someone who likes to look to an outside authority for guidance — you’re a member of a religion, a believer in magic, or perhaps engage in superstitious rituals — then you’ll assume that you have to rely on outside influences to change your situation. The same will be true of you, if you spend your life in wishful thinking. You’re likely to try to improve your life by pretending that it’s different from reality, instead of understanding what the reality is and learning how to cope with it.
Accepting reality actively means that you don’t just sit around and let things be. It means thinking about your situation and exploring to understand what’s going on. Many times there will be circumstances that you can’t change and you have to put up with them. Other times you may find a way around them or just simply ignore them. The key to accepting reality and making it work is being fully focused and active, so you are able to sort through those things you can do something about, from those you can’t.
You’ve focused on what’s happening . . . now what?
When you know where action or change is possible, you can make your life more productive. You’ve discovered what’s blocking your progress and is within your power to change. You’ve also discovered ways to cope with what can’t be changed and know how to work around them so you are not held back by frustration and uncertainty.
When you are active rather than fatalistic, you focus on dealing immediately with what matters and allow no time for things you cannot affect. Don’t waste your precious time by fulminating over things you can’t change — accept that they are there and move on regardless.
Why don’t you use your knowledge to help you improve your life? Once you know how to deal with reality in your life, you will gain insight into how you can be more productive. Your involvement and action in managing how you live will enable you to cope with the world as it is, rather than how you wish it would be. You can’t dodge reality however much you’d like to. The best you can do is to deal with it (so far as you can) so that the outcomes more often work for your interests than against them. Just as understanding something is essential if you want to change it, so accepting reality is the first step to changing your life for the better.
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