Gratitude and Acceptance

There are two halves in life; the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr sums them up: 

“The task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one’s life. It answers such questions as “Who am I?” “What makes me significant?”The task of the second half of life is to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.”

The first half of my life was dominated by ambition and goal setting. Success required discipline and perseverance. I’ve long considered those traits to be the great differentiators in life. 

The second half of my life commenced with retirement. Having built my container, I wasn’t sure what it was meant to hold. Ambition and perseverance didn’t feel as relevant anymore. The second half of life brings new challenges. What direction should I take? Further exploration was required.

As a part of that exploration, I extended my mindfulness practice using techniques outlined by Buddhist monk Sayadaw U Tejaniya in his book “Relax and Be Aware.” Exercises in the book focus on helping the reader learn to watch awareness. I know that sounds strange. The best way to describe it is learning to watch one’s reactions in the moment, rather than blindly acting them out.  Insight from this helped me cultivate new practices for the second half of my life. 

The first practice is gratitude. It’s taken me a while to figure out that life isn’t about me. In fact, it’s the other way around. I’m about life. Life is a gift. The more I reflect on this, the clearer it becomes that the appropriate response is gratitude. 

Gratitude wasn’t something I previously thought about much. It seemed more like a component of good manners, a polite obligation. Saying thank you is one of the first social skills parents teach us. However, practicing gratitude goes much deeper than that.

When expressing gratitude, it feels like I’m part of something larger, something more important than myself! The naturalist John Muir wrote: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” It’s easier to witness what I’m a part of when I look at the world through a lens of gratitude. Gratitude complements love, which seeks union. Expressing gratitude is both a realization and acknowledgment that we belong. What could be more fundamental to a life well-lived?

The second new practice is acceptance. Gratitude is important, but the granddaddy of second-half life skills is acceptance. In fact, I’m beginning to think it’s a superpower. Earlier in life, I associated acceptance with passivity. Why accept things when they can be improved? I was wrong! 

Acceptance is the most challenging skill I’ve ever practiced. By the time we reach the second stage of life (and often well before), we learn that we don’t have as much control as we might have expected or hoped for. 

Complete acceptance requires accepting things as they are without wishing them to be different. That’s really hard. When faced with adverse circumstances, I sometimes think, “Why me?” Even when I accept difficult situations, it’s hard not to wish things were different. Such thoughts don’t help. They disturb my peace. Complete acceptance unburdens me from dashed hopes and unfulfilled desires. Full acceptance brings peace. 

I’ll give you an example:

Last year, our oldest son had a hemorrhagic stroke. It came on suddenly, without warning. That’s a hard thing to accept. It happened on a beautiful sunny day. I was pretty upset and scared as we drove to the Oregon Health Sciences University Hospital. To cope, I decided to mindfully shift my attention to acceptance.  Portland is beautiful in springtime. There are flowering bushes and trees on every lawn. The circumstances were terrible, but I was alive on a beautiful day. Why not focus on that?

Practicing acceptance that day helped me to clear my mind. It induced calm for the diagnostic tests and doctor consultations that followed. Acceptance and gratitude turned out to be surprisingly effective, even liberating.

The later stages of life will be full of opportunities to practice gratitude and acceptance. I’m already finding them useful for small irritants like painful knees, slow drivers, and long telephone hold times. 

Discipline and perseverance served me well in the first half of my life. Gratitude and acceptance will be even more valuable in the second half. 

I’m not yet sure what my container was meant to hold. Perhaps the question can only be answered by the life I live. In the meantime, I’ve decided to fully accept what comes my way with gratitude. 

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