Acceptance (Openness, Equanimity, Patience)
Compassion (Empathy, Love of Self, Forgiveness)
Wisdom (Discernment, Perspective, Insight)
"Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." ~Pema Chödrön [1]
At the same time, no lesson is useful until we're ready to learn.
Life consists of a series of practices--not merely routines, but disciplines, ways of being. This is if we choose to see life this way--and it is a choice.
There are many such practices, but these three have been particularly important to me. I don't know what it would mean to "master" any of them--I certainly haven't done so--but every day we have an opportunity to make some progress on them.
The Practice of Acceptance
"That’s the way life is... Everything doesn’t always go your way. And if you think it should, you’ve got a problem.” ~Gregg Popovich [2]
The inverse of acceptance is rejection. We reject "what is" in favor of "what we want." The fundamental problem is that "what we want" is to transcend mortality, and yet this existence is finite. The end of this existence is approaching for each of us, whether or not we're prepared to accept it. In the meantime, accepting things we would prefer to reject is good training.
Acceptance isn't passivity. It's openness to experience, equanimity in response, and patience as the process unfolds. Nor is taking action to influence outcomes equivalent to rejection. But knowing the difference takes compassion and wisdom.
The Practice of Compassion
Compassion starts with empathy--the ability to vicariously experience another person's inner state. Theresa Wiseman notes that empathy encompasses four attributes:
1. The ability to see the world as another person sees it.
2. The ability to understand another person’s feelings.
3. The ability to suspend judgment.
4. The ability to communicate this understanding, which is essential if empathy is to be felt. [3]
Note that empathy is not agreement. We need not agree with another person's rationale for their thoughts and feelings, and we need not approve of how their thoughts and feelings are being expressed. But we do have to cultivate the capacity for an empathetic response.
Empathy for others is what makes it possible to love ourselves. Love of self doesn't mean narcissistic self-regard or a lack of humility. It means a sense of self-compassion rooted in a process of, first, accepting ourselves, and, then, empathizing with others. The sequence can have a big impact here. It can be hard to truly, sustainably empathize with others until we love ourselves.
All this allows for forgiveness. It makes forgiveness possible. Without acceptance, empathy, and love of self, we cling to our grievances, grudges, and disappointments. We condemn ourselves to frustration.
The Practice of Wisdom
This allows us to work on wisdom--to discover it within ourselves and to be open to it from other sources.
Wisdom isn't intelligence. I know many foolish smart people--I often am one myself. Intelligence can help, but it's neither sufficient nor a prerequisite for wisdom.
Wisdom starts with discernment--the ability to sense differences, to perceive nuance and subtlety, to see the full range of possibilities in a given situation and in life as a whole.
Discernment allows perspective--we can identify and assess our assumptions, our interpretations, and our responses, and we can sift through them and weight them appropriately. Some we accept, some we amplify, and many we discard.
The monkey mind is an endless source of ill-founded assumptions, misguided interpretations, and unjustified responses, and we have a new bad idea every second. Wisdom doesn't stop us from generating them, but it can slow us down and pause us in the process of acting upon them.
This allows for insight--by discarding bad ideas, we make room for a handful of good ones. We can't produce them on command, but we can create the conditions in which we see them more clearly because they're allowed to shine through the fog of our habitual foolishness.
We can only learn these lessons when we're ready, and that may take a long time. But the passage of time isn't sufficient to establish readiness, no matter how many years go by.
We need to be paying attention.
We need to be attuned to our rejection, our bitterness, our ignorance.
We have to embrace these qualities within us--they make us human.
And then, when we're ready, the practice will be waiting.
Notes from a hike on the Estero Trail, Point Reyes National Seashore.
Thanks to Dan Oestreich, Erik Bengtsson, Mary Ann Huckabay, and Sage Cohen, who each helped inspire these thoughts in their own way.
Footnotes
[1] When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Chapter 11: "Nonaggression and the Four Maras," page 85 (Pema Chödrön, 2000)
[2] "Warriors might want to emulate the Spurs, just not how they have in the past" (Connor LeTourneau, The San Francisco Chronicle, November 2, 2019)
[3] A Concept Analysis of Empathy (Theresa Wiseman, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 1996)
