I was on a long drive when my brother called, and so began a two-hour conversation that covered a million random things. To avoid an unnecessary lead-up, I’ll get right to the point. One of the topics that arose in our incredibly long conversation involved the complicated, albeit false, comparison held between the notion of giving up and acceptance.

Now, at first glance, of course, those are different things. But, like most things, the words are easier to say than they are to live, and there are parallels we draw without notice. 

So what do these words really mean, and how can we make the distinction? 

When we think about acceptance, we consider letting go of our attachments, particularly those associated with control. When we think of giving up, we think of walking away, quitting or admitting defeat. You can see the similarities, but without proper attention, our misguided interpretation does us a disservice. 

Letting go and giving up are not the same thing. Letting go, or acceptance, is the retreat from acts of resistance. It is the moment we realize our active state through the lens of compassion, and recognize that our efforts may be of better use elsewhere. Uniquely, giving up is the retreat from effort entirely.

Letting go, or accepting our circumstances, is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves in our time on Earth. It is a process we adopt to surrender any calls for control from avenues without plausible influence. We know our efforts there are moot, so we allow ourselves to act accordingly. 

Now I will ask you, what is acceptance’s antithesis? It would be denial, it would be rejection. Perhaps we could muddy these experiences and call them fear, or we can call them distance. Distance in that it further distances us from the here and now, and most certainly pushes us away from our intended direction. We build miles between us with denial and ask ourselves how we can cross them.

If we are to look at acceptance and then to denial the question is always what? What are these responses to? 

Well, they’re responses to us, to our lives, and to the way of things as they are right now. We either admit them to be true, or we fight against the current to believe that they are not. Now, truth is a slippery thing, but so are our illusions, and our minds oscillate between combining their use and remaining in our perspectives entirely. 

When you think about letting go, what are you telling yourself will change? Are you believing that life is only dynamic under your pressure? Is your suffering the kindling to the flame?

Of course not, or at least of course these are not true, regardless of your degree in subscribing to these ideas. No cosmos would ask you to fight beyond the nature of things, and even this confusion is a natural thing we must lean into when given the chance. 

Often, we decide that acceptance means we’ve granted permission for the undesirable to remain. We view acceptance, much like giving up, as admitting our failure, as losing our quest. We imagine ourselves in a sudden stalemate. We establish life as victorious over us, we are rendered hopeless.

That’s not what acceptance is asking of you though, is it? When you’re asked to accept, which I believe is a common request made by our lives or by the universe, you’re actually being asked to be present and take count. Look at your lives for what they are. You can do more by granting yourself this awareness than you can by pretending it isn’t there. 

Unlike giving up, acceptance does not remove you from the so-called fight and instead lets you map the battleground. Where are you? What is around you?

It’s simple: we cannot make a change without knowing what needs to be changed, and we certainly cannot make a change when we’re tackling what is beyond our scope.

In reality, more is willing to move forward when we’ve figured out where we're starting from. If we hope to build something, we need to know what we have to work with. We have to be honest about what we have access to and what we don’t. In this way, it’s more obvious than ever that we’d need to accept our lives as they show up, instead of where they lie in comparison to a goal or desire.

So, this long conversation began, and my brother and I sifted through the differences seeking where the line gets blurred. It is when we confirm the happenings in our lives that we become fearful of their arrival, despite already being there. That’s the blur.  Perhaps this is where our anxiety comes from in idle moments, or when we sit down to meditate. Our brains are built to predict, protect, and our lives of increasing complexity are demanding resolution. 

Despite knowing this, I often have to tell myself that the way of all things is not within immediate control. I am not, in my tossing and turning before bed, able to resolve the stresses of tomorrow or the state of our affairs as people. In the same way, I am not granting these worries permission to continue by deferring to rest, only admitting that there’s nothing I can do right now that is more helpful than sleep. 

When I hope to achieve certain things, I must note to myself what is in my toolbox, what is missing, and where I can begin. Notably, I must do so with compassion, as much of our admitting must tackle some degree of shame. It is this shame that feeds our fear. It is the belief that we have more to say in our suffering than we do, though this is true, just not in this way. 

Our suffering is indeed compounded by our resistance to our discomfort with our realities. We experience dissatisfaction, we double down and make it worse by refusing to admit that it is true, even if we know it to be.

Without this acceptance, this honesty, we begin to forge a fragmented sense of our worlds; as they become ones built through judgment and comparison to desire. Our actual experiences, the realities of the right now, roll against these perceptions tectonically, in that they cannot overlap without gaining prominence. It becomes harder to sift when they’ve become mountains. 

The greatest lesson I’ve learned in my life is the art of letting go, though I am a student of it for just as long as everyone else. I remember being in high school and having zero sense of what letting go looked like, only that it had to be done. 

I once visualized letting go as a defeat. I cut ties, I walked away. I viewed letting go as burning bridges with people or pathways, not learning how to build or repair. But it was acceptance all along. It was not severing ourselves from our truths, but mending ourselves with them. It is a far more visceral experience than it is cognitive; we have to embody this acceptance, we have to rearrange our sense of our lives. 

In this way, acceptance contains this process of reconciling our beliefs with the way of things and expressing the utmost compassion in the meantime. It is not this failure associated with giving up, but taking stock and calibrating our intentions with the way things are, not how we hope them to be. 

Imagine you built atop uneven ground but hoped it was level to avoid the effort of digging. We thought instead that our work was in building, not in ensuring that we accommodate the ground. This is resistance, denial. When the building begins to tilt and our efforts are influenced by the gaps between it and the ground, we blame gravity and pray for less weight against it. The building is not working, so we give up. We do not accept the ground as uneven, we do not account for the way gravity exists.  Seems rather ineffective, not to mention wasteful.

Wasteful of our lives, the true and honest experience of living. It is inconsiderate of our energies; they are spent in resistance by pursuing life through beliefs that we know in our minds to be untrue. We saw the uneven ground, we just thought we were exempt from it. 

This is an essay that became much longer than I ever intended it to be. Still, the message could go on forever, as we will face many opportunities to practice what we’ve learned. I expect that we’ll be confronted by this realization more than any other in our lives. This, too, must be accepted. Maybe that’s the hardest one of all.

Read my brother's complimentary essay here.