If I could give one gift to my children, I think it would be
“acceptance”. It isn’t too hard to understand intellectually that we
should simply accept life on life’s terms and not try to control what
we can’t really control. Yet, it’s a hard lesson to learn. I think not
accepting may be the source of most, if not all, suffering. When we
live with the view that reality ‘should be’ other than it is, we are
living in a dream (at best) and a state of self-deception and denial
(at worst). Not accepting throws us into a relationship with the world
in which we must either control our environment or cope with
circumstances we consider beyond our control.

At
some moment in our lives, usually in middle age, we finally accept
something we’ve always known—the fact that we are going to die some
day. For some, this may be an explicit awakening: for others, a kind of
resignation and giving up on dreams.

For me, it came sometime in my early 50s when I realized that I had
put off for years the things which I said I always wanted to do and
that, whether I died tomorrow or in 30 years, I was going to have an
unfulfilled ‘to do’ list. I stopped comparing myself to some ideal
standard in my mind and just accepted that whatever I was doing was
what I was doing and that was that. That meant accepting my lifelong
habit of procrastination as just exactly the way my life was being
lived and that it was perfect that way. It also shifted my relationship
with choice. I could do something or not do something, and it was okay
either way.