acceptance

 A friend of mine and I were talking the other day about loss: specifically loss of a friendship or relationship wiht a loved one (not a death per se) and I noted, at some point, you just have to accept your general lack of power in a situation to really move on. He asked how you get okay with that. And I didn't have a great answer, but I have some thoughts.

1. This is a little bit about getting okay with injustice: Often when things go down, we struggle, internally, externally, interpersonally to accept that things are just, put simply, unfair. You are being asked to carry the weight, or being asked to let go when you don't want to, and it isn't the door that opens a window or whatever. It isn't opportunity. It just sucks. Most people have a very hard time with this concept. That something bad has happened to them and there isn't a reason, there is just a void, a sad reality, a mourning. Your parade was rained out and the town didn't band together even stronger than before. It just didn't happen. 

I think people have a problem with injustice because a universal sense of fairness makes them feel safe. But of course, this is bullshit. Young children are killed in shootings. There is no justice in that. Trying to convince anyone of the sense of fairness in that illicits its own stash of very unpleasant and revealing thought processes we best not engage in.

Does this mean there is no justice, that fairness is a farce that we should abandon? Absolutely not. Striving, personally and interpersonally, as a social norm and societal goal to be fair and just is part of having a successful happy society. It is a core tenant of pro social behavior. It is critical. But believing we should strive to act just, be kind or fair, because it builds a better world is different than believing you should do so because there is inherent justice in the world,  or in life.

And so maybe you are religious. You believe in a just deity, a kind faith, the scales of balance. I think that it is still tenable to believe in a such a world order while still letting go of the idea that your immediate environment is governed by just balance.

I will explain: 

2. This is also about accepting the limits of your personal scope: which is to say, that as unsafe as people feel letting go of justice, they also have an even harder time accepting scale.

I would like to posit, based on nothing other than my personal upbringing and my puny brain's thoughts, that if there is a universal order, someone at the wheel, a collection of deities controlling reality, or an octopus in the sky, than that is pretty epic situation, and if justice is one of their key drivers, it is probably happening on a bigger scale than you can fathom. Which is to say, the dinosaurs migtht have died so we little flesh monkeys could walk the earth, but if you ask a dinosaur, they aren't going to be thrilled with the fairness of that equation. 10000 years of a just equation might be pretty fucking unfair for those skimming by for 100. Expecting life to be fair on a personal scale just because the universe might be isn't necessary logical.

So I guess I am saying: accepting that bad things can happen and we will never see the justice of those occurences is, sometimes, just critical in deciding what choices still exist for you to move on and try to be okay.

Once upon a time I had to accept that someone I loved just..for whatever reason, wasn't going to have me in their life any more. My dealings with this includes a variety of ways I could change this and a bunch of interpersonal dealings around how this might go that would make this okay for me. Just. Fair. Okay.

But the reality was that it just wasn't okay. It was never going to be an okay thing. That didn't mean I had no choices. I just couldn't make it okay. I could move on. I could find other things to love and be okay with, but those choices and actions wouldn't make this particular personal suck any less tragic, awful and unfair for me. This was my story. My story included that fucking awful thing. That was that.

But acknowledging that also meant I could decide to do things (or not do things) associated with, get right with it, as it were, and move along. I could leave the door unlocked because that made me feel good, but not because they had to walk through it to make that choice okay. I could also lock the door. Those were my choices. Nothing else.

Which is to say, sometimes you just have to accept that your life contains a shitty unfair and unhappy thing. It doesn't mean you have to be unknd of unfair, it doesn't mean all things will be unkind or unfair, it simply means you are powerless to change that a bad thing has or is happening. And you work with that, not against it, or around. Stop pushing the boulder, than is actually a mountain. It is attached. It is now part of the landscape. You don't have to like it, but you would do better visiting the ocean than trying to bulldoze over  that shit.