Life has been filled with challenges and sad news lately including aging and ill parents and learning that our family pet has bone cancer. Because of this, I’ve been thinking a lot about the term “radical acceptance” and what it means. The best definition I can come up with for radical acceptance is letting go of wanting things – that is people, situations, events, emotions, and even thoughts – to be the way we want them to be. Many, maybe even most, things are beyond our control. Understanding this, I then deliberately focus on things that are within my control: being present to the truth of things and doing my best to show up with respect, kindness, integrity, patience, and a sense of humor.
Both Mary Oliver’s Poem “Wild Geese” and The Serenity Prayer have helped me embrace the concept of radical acceptance, so I share them with you below.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting– over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
The Serenity Prayer
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.