Do the Work by Gary John Bishop

Author:Gary John Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

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ACCEPTANCE

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Acceptance is brought to life by you. It’s a self-generated grace you grant yourself to illuminate real peace of mind and human connection. It’s a state where we can all take a breath and allow someone or something to just be itself without the need to alter it; change it; or hell, sometimes even interact with it. In short, we let that situation or person just be. Often, in our most contentious relationships, we are irked by the things that the other person says or has said, the way they act, character traits or behaviors that we think “shouldn’t be.” In reality, those are all things we just don’t accept about that person. That’s right—you’ve become the kind of person who is not okay with someone else being themselves!

Judgmental much? Being an accepting human being means you are open to allowing others to be who they are. Judgment, resentment, or whatever else is currently fueling you will eventually be your undoing.

I’m not speaking in a vacuum here. I am well aware of what it takes to finally accept someone. I devoted years of my life to quietly blaming my mum for how things had turned out for me. My punishment (although I didn’t know it at the time) was to distance myself from her, to be stingy with my whole self, to reveal myself in very small doses to her. I had become a resentful, angry, and disconnected man. I had spent so much time focusing on what I thought my mum should have done or shouldn’t have done that I completely lost sight of what she actually did do.

Until it hit me.

She gave me life. I got my shot at being alive. She did the most important part. The rest is now up to me. I know, I hear you, “Yeah, but what about the way I was raised?”

You can choose to have that shit be as relevant as the eggs you had for breakfast this morning or significant enough to model everything you do from here on out. The choice is yours. Whichever one you choose could well go on to be the making of your life.

Recently I was watching my eldest son play football (soccer, to the barbarians) on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday night. I noticed the whir of my thoughts, the worry and pressing concern for the BS of my life, what I needed to handle, the annoyance for this thing, and the unease about that thing. I just wasn’t present.

But I caught myself, and right there, at that moment, I suddenly imagined that my life was about to end. No, really—I got connected to the idea that this was my last night on this Earth. That my final breaths were counting down. Suddenly I was struck by the urge to suck this all in, to pause and take in every nuance, every last detail of my surroundings. Everything slowed. I had a momentary plunge into sadness, and then a profound stillness awoke within me.

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