This week’s homework is to identify four things which I need to radically accept and think through them.
Two were to be really hard and especially important to me. Which to select was obvious in my case since I have been obsessing over these twin sources of depression for months/years: i) that I and others are aging; ii) that I and others are going to die. Two were to be less important but still hard to accept. There are lots to pick from, but I chose: iii) that Winter is coming; iv) that we may all require a booster shot for COVID.
Next step: interpretations and opinions surrounding the four which I identified. Checking the facts, the last one is really a “maybe”, something that it’s too early to fret over. There’s really no need to radically accept a “maybe such-and-such” of that kind. In contrast, (i)-(iii) are undeniable. However, I recognized in doing the homework that how I interpret them isn’t a given. Starting with Winter, I interpret it as bleak, long, dark, claustrophobic. As for (i), I interpret what’s to be accepted as this terrible thing aging; that is, as this horrible loss of youth. Finally, I interpret the reality such that the finitude of life takes away its day-to-day value.
Re-evaluating, now. Winter used to have its pleasures. It wasn’t merely something to be escaped when possible. True, last year it was pretty awful. But it wasn’t always so. Walking in the snow. Christmas and New Years. Reading by the fire. Skiing (I hope I can return to that this year). I can and should re-emphasize those. In the past, maturing has brought new things to my life. Yes, I’ve lost a few things I miss dreadfully, e.g., activities with the girls when they were little and very attached to their dad. But many new pleasures emerged, such as fly-casting lessons. That’s likely to occur again. Closing with (ii), which is apt — death is the end — as I try to remember: that a novel comes to a close isn’t a good reason for not reading it.
Re-evaluation softens the blow of the three things I need to accept. But there’s still bitterness to each. The last step in this homework is to run through some techniques for accepting:
- observe that you are resisting
- review the advantages of accepting (e.g., experiencing a sense of relief from ending an exhausting struggle, leaving constant rumination behind, working with what you’ve got, avoiding what the Buddha called “the second dart of painful feeling”)
- make a choice to accept instead of resisting
- attend to bodily sensations when thinking about what needs to be accepted
- attend to the grief that comes with accepting and don’t fight it, since that only increases suffering
- reinforce, using a mantra, that life is worth living even accepting these things.