Living With What Cannot Be Changed

Our society wishes us to believe that, given enough time, everything eventually heals. Pain is expected to soften, memories are supposed to lose their sharpness, and the scars left by difficult experiences are expected to fade away as life moves forward. 

But this is not how our universe shaped us over the millennia.

There are experiences from which we can never completely recover. The grief of losing someone we deeply loved may remain with us as long as we remain conscious. 

A betrayal may permanently alter the way we look at a relationship, while a failure or humiliation may continue to occupy a small corner of our memory long after the event itself has lost its relevance.

Yet the permanence of a wound does not necessarily mean that our life has to remain defined by it.

Accepting that it has become part of our story is perhaps a more difficult form of healing than making the pain disappear. We can never return to being the person we were before a particular loss or disappointment, and trying to do so may simply keep us looking backwards when life has already moved forward.

Life has moved on, and so have we.

Acceptance does not mean giving in or simply putting the experience out of our mind. Rather, it means refusing to let the event—or the person involved—continue to control or affect our lives. Something can remain important without remaining in control of our lives.

Some things are simply painful, unfair or irreversible. Accepting that reality can nevertheless free us from the exhausting expectation that we must somehow repair what cannot be repaired.

In that sense, acceptance can become a form of moksha: a kind of liberation, a breaking free from the cycle of pain and attachment.

An authentic life is not one in which everything has been healed. It is one in which we recognise what cannot be changed.

This is in response to the prompt: Friday Writings #247: Reframing Negative Concepts