Doing the Days

Practicing Acceptance?

Had to follow up on my last post and give a new weather report. The snow came today. October 10. Doesn’t beat the earliest snow I remember (September 30, year somewhere near 1962), but it beats most first-of-the-year snow falls by about a week. Besides that, it stayed all day, even though it was only a dusting. Donny went out and picked the rest of the apples off our trees and when he came in said he’d remember that – how cold it was as the snow fell on him each time he pulled one.

I knew I had to write about the snow but then I realized I had something else I needed to add, a sort of additional addendum to my last musings on complaints.

I’ve got a few e-mail buddies and one of them is a woman who wrote me after seeing an article I’d written that had one sentence in it on solitude. She wrote saying she wanted to hear more and we’ve been friends ever since. It’s been nearly a year now.

Recently Chris wrote that she was starting the Forty Days of The Dialogues and wondered if I’d “do the days” along with her. I said I would. I’m pretty sure it was the 9th day when there was this one paragraph about acceptance that really spoke to me in a new way. I knew all about it (ha ha!) for having written the thing, and more by way of it being among my favorite ideas – one that says acceptance isn’t about accepting the way “things” are, but about accepting how you are – how you feel in the present moment.

It was after that when I got this startling idea that complaints might just be about accepting the way you feel. Try that one on for size, I told myself. Oh, I know that when you feel wonderful you’re not going to call it a complaint. I, at least, don’t have too much trouble accepting my wonderful feelings. I’ve got that down pretty good.

But I don’t always feel wonderful. I’ve got things that bug me. And they’re not all like the early fall of snow that you might complain about while secretly enjoying. Some of my complaints are about how I feel when I’m not secretly enjoying something and just grousing for the sake of grousing. These complaints usually get admitted amongst friends. “Man, when that happened, I really felt…lousy” or troubled or worried or frustrated.

If you’ve ever done what you call complaining and then felt like you shouldn’t have complained, try my idea out for yourself. What if you’re practicing acceptance?