I think I first truly understood and internalized radical acceptance the morning of my open heart surgery, four years ago.

I knew it was a serious operation, I knew it would hurt afterwards. I can’t do anything about the operation, I thought, or  the pain afterwards.  I had no control over whether I would live or die.

Pain is inevitable, I thought. Suffering is my choice. It was a powerful revelation for me, and it has shaped and guided my life and choices and feelings ever since. Radical Acceptance was not my idea, it is a philosophy that has been deepening and growing in recent years, a way of look at the world that I love and embrace.

Radical acceptance grounds me every day. I cannot control what I see on the news, or what  politicians are doing to our country, but how I respond to it is up to me. I respond by seeking to go good every day, to commit small acts of kindness so faithfully and continuously that I feel peaceful and content within myself.

Radical acceptance is often misunderstood, I think.

Radical acceptance does not mean agreement or passivity or surrender.

Radical acceptance  at its simplest is the acknowledgement and acceptance of reality. The news might be awful. Dogs die before we do. All of us will get sick and die of something. Some of us will need surgery to live. A friend gets sick, I can’t cure him, I accept his illness and turn to understanding how I can help, or not help.

Publishing has changed, it seems there is no longer any place for me in my old book world. I accept this change, and move forward to find new ways to find my audience and write. I can’t do anything about the nature of publishing. Not suffering is my choice. I lost my dog, I loved m dog, I accept his death, I will get another dog.

I resign myself to bad news every day now, I resign myself to disappointment, to the existence of anger and cruelty, and to death.

Fighting reality only increases my pain. Suffering is optional. “…suffering is what happens when we refuse to accept the pain in our lives,” writes psychologist and author Van Dijk (Calming the Emotional Storm: Using Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills to Manage Your Emotions & Balance Your life.) 

In a spiritual sense, radical acceptance asks that I look at myself and others in a new and different way. I try to learn to let go of what I should be and accept the way that I am. This is a very difficult thing for me to do, I progress in small and sometimes painful steps.

In a practical sense, it is a way to understand the reality of human beings in this world – they are sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes selfless, sometimes greedy and violent. That is the reality of being human. My response is to do good, for now, that is all i can do.

Human beings have struggled over ideas about good and evil since the beginning of time, this struggle will not end in my lifetime, perhaps ever. This is where I descent into my own heart and make my stand through my life, not my arguments.

But it is a lot. I can’t be responsible for the world, only myself. I can only try to live a loving life.

First, I accept  reality, then I am free to deal with it: Okay, this is what is happening, How do I want to deal with it?

This idea helped me again after the November, 2016 elections, when the very air seemed to be filled with anger and argument.

I took a long walk in the woods that  day, and I came home and told Maria that I would not speak the next four years or longer in anger and resentment and argument. I could not change the election. I could not vanquish the anger and resentment of so many people.

But I could change me, I could descend to my heart, the center of my being and ask myself what would make me feel good and make my life meaningful. It was not, I decided, to hate and to argue.

I set out ways to do good, the Army of Good appeared mystically in my life, and we have together done good almost every day since that day in November. I can’t even calculate all the good we have done, all the small acts of great kindness.

No matter what storms are raging around me, I feel mostly good and grounded, my center is intact and  strong. I cannot control what other people do, I can only control what i do. When I stumble and fall, I do more good. I regain my footing. I come through my Emotional Storms, and I accept them as well. They are a part of me, I am no saint.

The beautiful thing about listening to my heart is that the heart is the place where I am most myself. After my surgery, I came closer than ever to my heart. It is the very core of my being, my spiritual center of my being.  Silence and solitude are the pathways to my heart, where i hear the voices that call me to life.

After the surgery, I came to love my heart and listen to it. If felt like I came to see with new eyes and ears.

There, I meet the whole world and learn what it is I need to accept and what it is I need to do to live my life.

I don’t feel the least bit radical, but I suppose acceptance really is a radical idea, given the suffering, regret, denial, anger, argument and emotional storms I see raging all around me. I have not found the secrets of life, mine or yours, but radical acceptance has been a great gift to me.

I refuse to be miserable, I reject wallowing and suffering. Unlike pain and disappointment, those things are not inevitable.