Mindfulness
How to Stay Centered in a World That Feels Unbearable
Acceptance means beginning with realism and ending with optimism.
Posted April 21, 2025 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Key points
- To accept the present means to begin with realism and move forward with optimism.
- Acceptance means recognizing that your current reality is exactly what you're experiencing.
- Acceptance is embracing yourself, your life, and others as they are—not as you wish they were.
- Acceptance is the first step toward breaking the emotional chains that prevent love—for yourself and others.
In our rapidly evolving world in which climate crises, political polarization, narcissistic politicians, and social-media-abetted loneliness have become the new norms, it’s easy to fall prey to doomscrolling and taking constant insipid gulps from the digital trough. These continual, periodic checkups on the world leave you feeling breathless, frustrated, often scared, and almost always just plain disappointed.
Here’s the current reality for most of us: The world is not as you wish it to be, and you don’t know what to do about it. What can you do? Let’s take a page from the life of a Navy aircraft carrier pilot whose world was shattered overnight.
Fall From Grace
Bill was living happily married at home with two children when the Vietnam War (called the “American War” in Vietnam) intruded. A few months after deploying there, he was captured. He soon found himself emaciated, starved, and desperately trying to survive in a windowless, mosquito- and rat-infested cell, his entire previous life an evanescent memory.
Bill refused to accept what his life had become. Until one day, a day like any other in the terrible succession of his days in captivity, a loud voice he could not identify startled him. It said, “This is your life.”
“When I heard this voice, things changed,” Bill shared with Yale Medical School psychologist Steven Southwick. At that moment of acceptance of his present reality, his life took a sharp upward turn.
“When I really admitted it to myself, I just kind of stopped fighting and things got a lot better,” Bill continued.
Accept, in This Moment, What Is …
Acceptance means that when you assess your life, you begin with realism and end with optimism. You start with an unbridled acceptance of what is. Operating from this real, sturdy platform, you open your mind to thinking optimistically about the future. This balance of realism and optimism will enable you to accept what is and work toward what can be.
You internalize the words of Viktor Frankl in Man's Search for Meaning. “When we are no longer able to change a situation,” observes the Austrian psychologist, “we are challenged to change ourselves.”
This is not acceptance in the sense of “I will resign myself to my lot in life, including a dead-end job, a dysfunctional relationship, and a lack of motivation to accomplish something better.” It is acceptance in the sense that “I will accept that at this point in time, my reality is exactly what I am experiencing, and nothing else. I will be realistic about where I am, right now, in my life, rather than fooling myself into believing I am experiencing something different. Armed with this difficult-to-accept-but-true knowledge about where I am, I will envision what is possible for me next and what I want to be in the future.”
“Be willing to have it so,” wrote the psychologist William James. “Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.”
Acceptance has been defined as “the willingness to openly experience thoughts, feelings, physical sensations, and life events.” Acceptance means accepting yourself, your life, and others not as you would like them to be, but as they are.
If you want to be accepting of others, you must be able to unswervingly accept yourself. The converse is also true: numerous studies over the past century have revealed the strong correlation between an individual’s capacity to accept themselves as they are and to accept others as they are.
Malcolm X understood this connection. “We cannot think of being acceptable to others,” the human rights leader once shared, “until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.”
… And Build Your Strength to Change It
Acceptance is the precursor of change. There is immense power in seeing the challenges of the world as they are and then acting toward yourself and others to create the world as you would like it to be. “Some men never seem to grow old,” wrote Shakespeare. “Satisfied, yet ever dissatisfied, settled, yet ever unsettled, they always enjoy the best of what is, and are the first to find the best of what will be.”
Discover some contentment with your life, even if it’s not 100 percent how you wish it to be right now. Ask yourself, What is positive in the world? Make a list. There are still some beautiful, kind people in it, for instance. Give them their due and pay more attention to them.
Then balance this contentment with the discontentment you feel about the world to renew your energy toward working for social change.
Own Your Life
Once Bill truly acknowledged that he was a POW in Vietnam, once he accepted that his life had been reduced to a fight for survival, he could own his life again instead of struggling psychologically against the dramatic turn it had taken and feeling like the victim of external forces.
“I always knew I was in prison, but after that voice, it just changed,” Bill shared. “I just wasn’t as miserable anymore, and I started to take care of business … I started to exercise as much as I could, and I tried to stay in touch with some of the guys.”
Bill and others who have endured extreme, unimaginable hardships are a reminder to all of us that while it’s true that the only way out is through, it’s also true that the only way through begins with acceptance. Put simply, as I write in my new book Love and Suffering: Break the Emotional Chains that Prevent You from Experiencing Love, acceptance is the first step on your journey toward love—for yourself and others.
