Acceptance

I think it's human nature to fill empty spaces: to fill silence with words or music; to fill an empty mind with images of entertainment. Maybe there's merit to the Aristotelian proverb: "Nature abhorrs a vacuum."

While attempting to make this exile a productive period of my life, I find myself still staring at screens: I've watched TV shows, done more online shopping, and even some internet "research". I keep reminding myself to come back to Now, to be "in the moment" - at work, to focus on the task at hand; at home, to focus on my family.

The good news is that I think I know what I'm looking for: I'm looking for balance and discipline in an effort to find Peace and Health. I admit things are awry and off-kilter in my life. But I suspect I am also looking for "There": as in, "I have finally arrived there", and now I can relax into my pillow-top mattress covered by my lush, 1000-thred count, woven Egyptian cotton sheets and twenty down pillows while my intelligent, obedient children teach themselves to read quietly in their rooms and my handsome, fit husband states his fondness for household duties and declares he will, in fact, be doing them all from now on. In other words, part of me is looking for that sweet spot, that precise combination of where everything in life makes sense; Where all is as it should be. I'm looking for perfection.

Life will never be perfect. I will never have everything I want, and that is okay; because Peace is not having everything you want. Peace is accepting you will never have everything you want, and that it is never good for anyone to have all their desires. Health is being satisfied with what is for its own sake. Health is doing what needs to be done, what your heart, mind, and body urges you to do, because obeying is right and true. Health is also knowing when the body's urges are no longer right and true, and staying this side of "Rightness" because wrongness and hiding and lying and drama have no appeal.

Peace and Health, to me, are about taking the moment in as it comes, accepting it for what it is, giving all that I am into that moment without regard to what I get back, and letting that moment go when it passes, without longing.

This delicate balance is about Acceptance. And somehow, I hope to arrive a little closer to my destination in one month.