Why Accepting Our Life Is Liberating

Life is not good nor bad.

Life is just life. It’s us who give the labels.

We have the good memories, the bad ones. We have a good life when the spouse we married ended up living to our expectations, when the job we took gives us the opportunities we wanted, when our children top the class or when the pancakes turn out as fluffy as we wany every single day. Nope.

But trouble starts the moment things move away from the picture we have in mind. We do our best to cope up. We build up resistance.

We conclude to ourselves no, this bad, this just cannot be happening to me. What did I do wrong?

We start comparing ourselves to our peers and conclude that life chose to give a tough road only to us. Life is singling us out. We put on our pinkest optimism glasses.

Maybe life is making us stronger for better things we tell ourselves. The best is yet to come.

Oh, how wrong we are again.

Why do we treat “Life” as a force beyond us that will give us “good” or “bad” and we take offense when “life” has different plans for all our efforts. We work hard so we want results. We made efforts to love this person and we want them stay with us and return that love to eternity.

Here is the truth — Life owes nothing to us.

We act, we face the consequences of actions. Life happens and we respond to it.Accepting life without a label is the path to freedom. But does it mean we give up?

No, we take the right action at that situation but renounce the expectations.

Letting go of the urge to label each day, each incident that happens and validating ourselves as blessed or unlucky person based on that is futile. We fret over people who “seem” to have it easy.

But are you sure?

We might be totally wrong about all our “good, bad, worse” scenarios that we have in mind. In our memories store an exaggerated version of the incidents and browsing over it just makes it worse.

And we would never understand how the chain of events connect in our life. How anything happens for a reason.

My mother was diagnosed with Schizophrenia and that after effects of watching her suffer led me to anxiety and depression. I don’t have a reason today. My recovery started the moment I accepted I was screwing my life and my presence is needed for my mother to recover too. I did’t have a choice but accepting it helped me.

No Gods, no prayers solved the mystery and the sufferings we endured questioned all the deepest beliefs I held.

Accepting the decisions we make and moving forward through action is the only way there is.

Bad things happen to good people. And the worst people we know end up having what we call a “ blessed” life. That is just life.

We cannot call karma for action. We waste our time when we wait to see people repent for all the evils they did to us. No, it is not going to make our life better. No, we might never see the abuser suffer. The redemption arc we are waiting for is not going to happen. Guess what, that’s okay.

We will end up learning that by wishing worse for our wrong doers, it’the power that we are giving away to them.

We have control over our actions, but never the results.

We have the power to decide what we want but how our “wants” evolve is again not in our hands.

Letting go of how life must be is freedom.

And always we have a choice. To let things happen and flow with it.

Article previously published in the Medium.