Accept life on life’s terms

Or you will break

Once we leave secondary education and move on to university, a job, and have to pay bills etc, life becomes messy. We no longer have the security of home, the cushion that parents provide, or someone else you grew up with.

We become adults but are still not fully formed as our lives in society are very new. We may have survived debilitating illness, lost a parent, been in a car wreck, all these things cause us to have insight and compassion, but it has not prepared us for life in the big wide world.

If we have been brought up well enough, we understand that life is unfair, full of injustice, broken promises, and flaky people. We will also know that there are trustworthy people, kindness, family and friends to cheer you on and celebrate the success you achieve.

If we are unable to accept what life brings to our path, we will break, and find it very tough to be mended.

I knew a life-changing illness at an early age. It’s progression rendered me, a quiet, reserved girl, to be passive and not care about what doctors did to me. This wasn’t acceptance, but utter defeat. I realized some years later that I had unexpressed anger, and PTSD.

I know of people who had seemingly undisturbed lives who are angry anyway.

Life is difficult. We fall in love and our hearts get broken. We study hard but can’t convert that into a good degree. Our friends can be unreliable. Our dog dies. All these leave us with a choice.

• We can become bitter and unpleasant to be around.
• We can accept what life hands us, accept it and do our our best.

When we accept the difficulties, we have succeeded with half of those difficulties.

We grow as humans with every experience we have, if we choose to accept it. We gain knowledge and wisdom. We become better friends to others, wiser parents, more understanding lovers. We are kinder, empathetic, compassionate, good listeners, and gentle.

We allow people to have space, know when to touch them, when to intervene, how to encourage, not to be shocked. We turn up with food, without food, we send sympathy cards because we know how much it means.

These qualities come more easily to some than others. But it is not a competition. We be who we are are. None of us is perfect.

We accept imperfect people.

We are able to comfort those who are suffering, and allow kindness to be more important than our fear. Thus, we can help someone who has fallen on the sidewalk, give directions to strangers who are lost, stay with a child who is crying or not crying until their parent finds them again.

I have told complete strangers that they must hold their three year old child’’s hand in a busy main street. I have repeated it when I ran into them again outside another store. My fear of saying it is less important than a child’s safety.

I don’t care what others think of me if I am doing the right thing.

Recently, someone posted publicly that there were ambulances, fire trucks, and a doctor’s car at a certain place. I politely asked her to remove it as whoever needed them deserved some privacy and the vehicles already announced their distress. Later, I saw she had added a link to the fire service’s report. Again, I asked her to remove it. If people want to look up what the fire service was doing that day, they can go to the website. We don’t publicize the trauma of others just because we can.

I held my family members as they died within eighteen months of each other. We have become unafraid to do this. It is compassionate, and dreadful, but we do it because we love.

We face our own trauma with grace as we have realized there is no alternative. We thank those who care for us with kindness and cheerfulness. We laugh when we are able to, as it is medicine to the soul, and a moment shared.

Connection is valued because we are all human and need each other. We have learned to disconnect from those who do not respect or honor us. It is better to have an enemy than friends who cannot realize our worth.

We contribute to our community because we know it important to give back. We do this according to our personality, some volunteer, some take on responsibilities, some leave small handmade treasures to delight others, and many unseen, unrecognized, gestures of charity and hope.

If you have read this, I hope you are comforted, inspired, reassured, and know that you are not alone.