The journey of a thousand miles

[much_ado]

I was thinking this morning about irony being a bitter pill to swallow, with specific context in mind and associated pains to illustrate my chosen stance, and was composing the post in my head on the drive to work. By the time I had time to try and marshal thoughts into words, however, I found that I had let go of the bitterness, and the Narrator

Comments

[horsetraveller]

I think it's interesting how books appear when you are ready to read them. I had this frustrating feeling of "why now when it's too late, why couldn't I have read and understood these books earlier?"
But the book that made the most impact on me, the gremlin taming book, in fact I OWNED THE BOOK before I found it in the library. I had read it several years earlier when I first bought it. I did not understand it. It went on the shelf and was forgotten.

So I think there is a point in that. :)

When I could understand it, that is when I found it again on the library shelf.

[much_ado]

I started reading Radical Acceptance when I bought it, just before or right around the start of grad school, and just couldn't make time or space for it in my head. Academia was rapidly filling my brain with noise I had to track, and if it wasn't required reading, I just wasn't getting to it. I wonder how things might have been different had I been able to internalize it then and implement it as self-development and self-care during school; it might have made coping with the rising personal crises go a little more smoothly, or it might simply have dragged out the inevitable conclusion a little while longer before the crash.

I've read it now, and have been moved by it in the now. That is enough.

Forced, or led?

[wesnotcrusher]

I would challenge your statement..." I may not like having been forced onto this path,..."

From where I sit, I see that events happened in your life that led you to the trailhead of this path. Movement along it has been your choice.

I know it's often easy for me to say 'fuck it' and let things fall apart. I also see it takes real courage to sit with the fear, the pain, the uncertainty and the grief and allow Yourself* to lead yourself down a path of healing and acceptance and change.

These are the things I see in you.

*capital Y meaning the inner divine you/higher self/higher power.

Re: Forced, or led?

[much_ado]

Movement along the path is only partly by my choice; others choices ALSO have impact on me, and I can no more control their choices than I can ultimately control the wind that fills a ship's sail. All I can do is choose how to trim the sail in response to the wind, and if I can't get to it in time, the ship capsizes - not by choice, so much as by lack of skill. All my choices in the world up to the point of being forced into the cold water don't mean a whole lot in that moment when the cold darkness closes over one's head; you're in the water. Sink, or swim.

I'm still not entirely certain I've really made that choice, yet.