While preparing the exterior of my home to be painted last Friday, I discovered some rather extensive damage from carpenter ants rotting wood. It was not the best start to the weekend.
I immediately called my pest control company to come out to check and treat the damage, but due to the holiday weekend, the earliest they could come out was Tuesday (yesterday) morning. That left me all weekend to stew in worry.
My initial reaction (as it often is when things go wrong in my life) was resistance to the reality of it. I went through all the usual resistance tactics: “It’s not fair!” “I shouldn’t have to deal with this!” “My pest control company should have prevented this!” “I can’t cope with one more thing going wrong!” (And on and on it goes….)
You know what all that resistance did for me? It kept me stuck.
That’s all it did. It kept me stuck in the anxiety, feeling lousy and stressed out and afraid.
It didn’t make the damage go away. It didn’t fix it. It didn’t even make me feel any better. (Actually, it left me feeling worse as I spiraled down into a pit of victimhood.)
Fortunately, I’ve learned this lesson before, so I didn’t stay stuck long. As Tara Brach says in her book Radical Acceptance:
“The boundary to what we can accept is the boundary to our freedom.” ~Tara Brach
By Saturday morning, I was already moving on to acceptance. I’m still not happy about the discovery. I still wish the damage hadn’t happened. I was still worried about what additional damage the pest control company might find.
And yet, accepting that this is my reality (whether I like it or not) moved me from stuck into a space of freedom where I could begin imagining possibilities for addressing the problem.
My imagining quickly created some possibilities that had the potential to not only deal with the damage I found, but also solve some other longer standing issues by using this opportunity to make some much bigger changes to the house through eliminating some unnecessary decorative areas.
Fortunately, after the visit from the pest control company and a long conversation with my engineer dad yesterday, it appears that I caught the problem early enough that damage beyond what I’ve already seen is unlikely and my out-of-the-box solution looks highly promising.
I’ve gone from feeling stuck, oppressed, and stressed out to feeling cautiously hopeful, and that shift is largely due to my willingness to accept the reality of what is (after that initial bout of resistance). Freedom to imagine solutions and to move forward came only through that acceptance.
It’s much like my work with kintsugi. I can’t start on the repairs to a stone until I have accepted the breakage that has already happened to it. Resisting the reality of the breakage doesn’t allow space to make repairs.
The reality is that life is hard. We all get our hearts broken at some time or another. We all suffer loss. Bad, unfair, hurtful, difficult things happen.
We can’t control any of that. What we can control is our response to it.
Radically accepting what is (even when we don’t like it and wish it were different) moves us from stuck to freedom where we can begin healing, creating something new, or addressing the hard things that need to be addressed.
Where are you stuck in resistance to hard things in your life right now?
What would it look like to shift toward acceptance? How might that acceptance make space for freedom to make things better?
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