Insight: Acceptance

How we live our life is dependent on how we react to things around us. Everything we do is in response to the actions of our environment. Think about it in your own life. Think about ANYTHING you did today. Somehow or other each every action was caused by something else. It's a scary thought, but how do we handle this and still live life?

In improvisational theatre, there is a concept called acceptance. This concept is that improvisers accept pretty much anything that is said or done so they may enhance the scene. Good improvisation embraces acceptance allowing the greatest and richest scenes to happen on stage. In short form improvisational comedy, this is especially important. Trusting other players to accept what you say and vice-versa fosters the best improv. Back to real life: if we take this idea of acceptance at a high level in our own lives, our potential is limitless.

By a higher level, I don't just mean saying "yes...and" to everything, but more than anything: treat everything as a gift. This idea probably doesn't sit well in most of us in 'American' culture, but what if we challenged our ideals in this manner. Of course, it is hard to imagine war and death as a gift, but ideas like those are bit beyond me at this time in my life. Look at this bug. In normal life, bugs are annoying, but if we look closer and see the beauty of its design, our whole perspective can totally change.

This idea more pertains to ordinary life. If your boss tells you to do better work, don't take that as discouragement, but encouragement. In my field as a creative, I put up all of my work to be critiqued on the walls and more than 95% of the time, my teachers tell me, "I don't like this, you need to rework." It sucks and it's a blow to my ego as my ideas are a part of me. My heart is in many of those ideas, but if I treat my instructor's comments as a gift, I can see that they are trying to challenge me to produce great work.

If we can treat life as a gift and treat each intricacy as a gift, we can live our lives to the fullest. A great friend of mine told me that he sees his life as a musician who is paying attention to a conductor (thanks Gary). In this analogy, we can see the conductor as outside factors in our life that we can choose to ignore or accept. If we treat those factors as gifts and take them and embrace them, the results could be astounding. Seeing each moment in our lives as a gift can lead to great peace in our life.

Human Life: See each factor in your life as a gift.
Insight: We don't see the gifts in front of us when we are too caught up in ourselves.

 Feel free to comment! I would still love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!