As Is Life

Are you feeling defeated? Do you feel defeated often? I know we are in the thick of winter, so it's easy to fall into the winter blues and that is difficult! Being I am at home most of the time due to chronic pain and illness, I fight with this in all seasons. Winter is the worst though, eh? It's amazing how one can train the mind though when given "tools".

But winter sure has something pretty to offer.

I feel like everywhere I look, my friends, or family and even strangers feel so defeated by life. Even myself this last couple of months. I was sick for four weeks and then my husband was also sick for one month. I am also having car troubles--and sunk $1300 into it just a few months ago, and now I have to put more money into it and it is currently broken down. My husbands 12 year old Mercedes (piece of crap--I mean, I love that car!!!), has NO heat. We live in Minnesota people. We also forked out $1400 for new carpet in our basement because we had a flood about 2 years ago, and our mortgage payment was deducted TWICE in our bank account! Does any of this sound familiar?? I can guarantee you, it does, huh? The list goes on and on and on and on. And I only listed a few things that I was feeling defeated from.

As a Lay Counselor, we do this thing called Acceptance Therapy. It's all in recognizing that life is FULL of pain and problems. That is a given. So why do we wake up everyday thinking this is not the case??? (Insert palm to forehead). We live in a very fallen world that is not only full of sickness and disease and death but also everyday crap like car troubles, money troubles, stress from parenting, job issues, marriage issues....life just keeps comin at us full force. And I'm here to tell you, it always will. ALWAYS. We will never be free of, well the inevitable!

Don't you think if we can learn to accept ahead of time that life is a piece of work, and that our days will be "good" at best, and that each day will bring a hiccup of some sort, and that each day will bring an inconvenience, there will always be problems to solve. We will always sit in traffic. We will always burn our dinners. We will always get sick. We will forever deal with rude people. We will never be free from conflict, pain, frustration, clumsiness, or annoyances......that we could function a lot easier? 

These things will continually exist among us. But with a new way to think about it, I think our days can cause us less trouble. We can accept ahead of time that this is just life. This is life's way. It's reality. Now that we know this, how about bring our discomfort levels down and learn to navigate through on a less stressful and anxious spirit? I think we can learn to manage our level of discomfort and spirit of complaint if we accept this ahead of time. It's almost like we wake up every morning thinking--"Today is going to be different, nothing will get in my way and nothing is going to go wrong!!!"

I submit that is not the right way of thinking---how bout--"Today is a great day, a new day! I'm so thankful. And it will most likely cause me some level of stress or frustration--or most likely both--but I can handle it, I know and accept that this is the way of life, I just will handle it differently and my perspective will be different, and I'll be able to tolerate it, instead of acting like I'm dying or the world is coming to the end."

Regardless of what you might think, you are not alone. You are not the only one who deals with "crap". We all have issues, struggles, trials, annoyances. We all feel life is unfair--surprise surprise, life IS unfair!!! All of our journeys are different, but that does not mean each person isn't dealing with their own stuff. Woe is me is not an option!

Acceptance Therapy gives us a chance to lower our pain and stress levels by accepting that life is, well, life. And there is no real way around it. But there are ways to handle it in a more positive, manageable way. Accepting that your day may go hay-wire is a good thing!

xo