Radical Acceptance — How to Embrace Tragedy
Life isn’t easy.
The tragic price of having anything in life is that we know that eventually, we’ll have nothing.
Loved ones, cherished memories, a healthy mind and body, the vital energy of youth — all of these will eventually fade away — and everything we cherish will be forgotten.
The agony of something lost can make us feel that it was never worth knowing the sweet ecstasy of ever having it in the first place.
Such is the nature of life.
How can we affirm that the journey is worth it?
Myths throughout history have served to explore this very question and reconcile the individual to the harsh reality of their own mortality.
While the nature of the characters in each of these stories have changed to fit the culture, and the attitude of the myths represent the attitudes of the times in which they were conceived, there are underlying messages across all of them which can help the individual of all cultures and times.
Here are a few of these messages which have stood out to me and helped in tough times.
- There’s No Beauty Without Tragedy
The greek gods envied man for their mortality.
If life was a never ending process in which each person would live forever, the value of anything we experience now would fall to zero.
The flower would lose its beauty. The sweet taste of food would become bland to us. The desire to protect our child — which is so tightly bound in with our deep sense of love for them — would become non-existent and obsolete. Our loved ones would become cold facts instead of our vulnerable, loveable companions.
The true joy in life — the true beauty to be experienced — is in the finite nature of things. The appreciation of anything comes from the awareness it will one day be gone.
Pondering this, I’d rather have a single day of mortality than an eternity of living forever.
2. The Present Moment is Enough
Leading on from the first message, the second is that there is only the present moment. The past and future don’t really exist.
Each moment of human history didn’t occur in that distant place we call the past — but in the same present moment we’re experiencing right now.
Eternity is the everlasting moment— not some abstract place in the future.
I often try to look back over my life and ask myself what I’ve gained by having the years which are behind me. If I were to die today, would it really be more tragic than dying in 60 years time?
I’m not so sure.
More days have been forgotten than remembered — and the sweetest memories I have can’t truly be experienced again. I can ponder them with some satisfaction, but they don’t make the present moment any more alive.
We all have the same moment — and each moment has the joy of an entire lifetime in itself if we learn to truly appreciate it.
3. We Are One With Nature — Nothing is Truly Destroyed
It sounds cliché, but we are eternally connected to everything.
The feeling of being separated from everything else is an illusion which leads us to feel isolated, afraid and morbidly fragile. But it isn’t really true.
If you believe that the universe is infinite, how can you believe that you’re somehow separate from it? Does it stop at the barrier of your skin — as if the universe is almost infinite minus the space in which you occupy?
We’re all units of consciousness standing in different relative positions, We love or hate one another because we are one another — we each hold a mirror up to the other and see ourselves.
Nothing is separate and nothing can be destroyed — it can only change form.
When loved ones die, when our bodies grow old, when friends come and go, this is all part of the flux of life. Things change, but the underlying forces which animate all things remain.
From death comes new life, from loss comes gain, from hate comes love. They are all the same thing.
It’s in learning to see both sides of tragic events that we realise nothing is truly lost or gained. Everything remains in perfect balance.
It’s true that this balance is maintained even at the cost of our individual lives. But we have some hope of transcending this reality by seeing even our own suffering from the perspective of our greater identity in the whole.
While each of these messages can help in dark times, they don’t make the tragic nature of life any less real.
That said, pondering these questions and ideas deeply can lead to at least moments of radical acceptance of the beautiful tragedy of life.
They help us to reconcile the brutal facts of finite existence and embrace the present moment. They allow us to see beauty in the pain and transcendence in the mundane.
They paint a dark world with colours of deep meaning — and allow us to rise above fatal events with loving acceptance.
They unlock the state of mind from which all of the polarities of material existence collapse into the unchanging oneness of bliss.
