The Stoic Art of Acquiescence: Accept And love whatever happens (practice 1)

“O world, I am in tune with every note of thy great harmony. For me nothing is early, nothing late, if it be timely for thee. O Nature, all that thy seasons yield is fruit for me.” — ---Marcus Aurelius  

Accept rather than fight every little thing that happens. If we resist reality, if we think things are going against us, if we fight with what is, then we will suffer. Therefore, we should not wish for reality to be different, but accept it as it is.  

“If this is the will of nature, then so be it.” That’s a maxim the Stoics lived by. Today, we have a similar saying ‘Thy will be done.” And it doesn’t matter whether we call it God, Nature, Fortune, or Fate—but we must acknowledge that there’s something bigger than us and that we don’t control everything that happens around us.  

The art of acquiescence is about the willing acceptance of external events. Accept even what the majority of people would judge as “bad.” Epictetus says that as philosophers we should adapt to whatever happens so that nothing happens against our will and nothing that we wish for fails to happen. Bring your will into harmony with what’s going on. “Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant,” as Seneca put it.  

Remember the dog leashed to a cart metaphor? The dog can either enjoy the ride and run smoothly alongside the cart, or he can stubbornly resist the direction of the cart while being dragged behind anyway. If we resist what happens, then we get dragged behind just like that dog. That’s called suffering  

It’s much smarter to accept reality and focus on where our power lies. As we’ve seen earlier, the hallmark of an admirable poker player is that he plays the best regardless of his hands. In the end, not the one with the objectively best cards, but the one who plays his cards the best, wins.

You don’t get to choose the hands you’re dealt, only how you want to play them. Your hands in poker as in life are indifferent, learn to accept them equally, without judging. If you can do that, if you can accept rather than resist what happens, then you will no longer be dependent upon things being in a certain way .

Get this impressive example:

Aged 67, after another day at the lab, Thomas Edison returned home. After dinner, a man arrived at this house with urgent news: A fire had broken out at the research campus a few miles away. Fire engines could not stop the fire. Fueled by chemicals, green and yellow flames shot up high in the sky, threatening to destroy the entire empire

Edison had spent his life building. When Edison made it to the scene, he immediately told his son, “Go get your mother and all her friends, they’ll never see a fire like this again.” What a reaction, right? He lost much of what he’d been working on his whole lifetime, and instead of getting sad or angry, he accepted it and tried to make the best with it. He started rebuilding what the fire destroyed the next day. That's playing the cards well. That's nonresistance.  

Plus, this example shows that Stoic acceptance has nothing to do with passive resignation. Edison started rebuilding everything the very next day. He accepted his fate graciously and tried to make the best with it. And that’s what the Stoics advise us to do: Don’t fight with reality, but bring your will into harmony with it, and focus on where your power lies.  

Marcus Aurelius has a trick to bring his will into harmony with reality. He compares what happens to us to what a doctor prescribes to us. Just like you take some medicine when a doctor tells you to, we should take external events as they are because they’re like the medicine there to help us  

What happens to us is nature’s treatment to become better people. Those things happen for us, not against us, even if it doesn’t seem so. Here’s what helps me: Nature is immensely complex and it’s impossible to tell whether anything that happens is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequences of misfortunes. And you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune. Therefore, I try to accept everything as if I had chosen it. This way, I move from a whiney victim to a responsible creator