Radical Acceptance

Sweet Bites for March 14, 2025

Mind Candy is a newsletter on practical philosophy and human flourishment—aka how to live “the good life.” Each month we tackle a new theme.

This month we’re exploring the theme of adversity.

Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.

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🍰 Mini Bite

In December 1922, while on assignment covering the Lausanne peace conference, Ernest Hemingway asked his wife Elizabeth Hadley Richardson to leave Paris and join him.

Married just a year before, he missed her. He was 23, a struggling writer, and was spending the evenings perfecting his craft.

Hadley packed a suitcase with Hemingway’s writing and headed off to see him.

But misfortune soon struck.

While waiting for the train to leave, Hadley jumped up to grab a drink and when she returned, the suitcase containing Hemingway’s work was gone.

Arriving in Lausanne eight hours later, Hadley could do nothing but cry. When she told him what had occurred, he reassured her it would be okay, he had the carbon copies after all. But then Hadley admitted she had brought all of it in the suitcase.

Everything Hemingway had ever written other than “three pencil drafts of a bum poem which was later scrapped, some correspondence between John McClure and me, and some journalistic carbons.”

Rushing home, Hemingway was met with the hard reality of the situation: his life’s work was gone.

Hemingway’s story is not unique. We all suffer misfortune, both by our own hands and the hands of others. We make bad investments and lose the business we’ve spent our life building. Or we come up with a brilliant idea only to lose it since we never wrote it down.

Life is filled with situations that gut punch us.

Between stimulus and response is a space, Viktor Frankl said, and in that space is our freedom. That space is our freedom to choose who we want to be. Our freedom to decide how we want to react. Our freedom to craft the life we want and are proud of.

But it all starts with accepting what lays before us. Before change can occur, acceptance of the situations must be embraced. For Hemingway, it took him returning home to see all of the work truly gone.

Too often, though, we prefer to avoid accepting the situation. We make excuses that our eyes are deceiving us or we choose to completely ignore reality, instead burying our head in the sand.

Once we learn to accept the situation, regardless of what we wished would have happened, we confront reality. Once reality has been solidified, we can begin the process of trying to change the situation.

Nietzsche called this amor fati, a full acceptance of one’s fate, an unflinching embrace of every situation that befalls us.

Acceptance teaches us we do not control everything. It reminds us we don’t always get our way. And once we learn this, then situations outside of our control, scenarios that didn’t turn out how we wanted, can be worked at.

We now have a direction for correction.

We can see the lay of the land and begin to make the appropriate actions necessary to change what is before us.

“We should be able to endure any pain that is brief, no matter how terrible,” Cicero once remarked.

The situation completely changed young Hemingway’s life. From this, he became a better writer. He kept writing. He shortened his prose. He worked tirelessly to make a name for himself as a novelist. And four years later, he did just that, publishing The Sun Also Rises which went on to be a bestseller.

But it all started with him accepting the hard truth that his work up to that point was gone. The die was cast. Now the decision had to be made. Would he allow the situation to determine his future or would he accept what had happened and make the most of it?

Radical acceptance, for better or worse.

It all starts with that.

It all starts with amor fati.

Source

🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation

🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom

📰 Article Worthy of a Read

Sailing into the storm: Acceptance and commitment therapy teaches us how to live a values-driven life even in the face of dark emotions and trauma by Joseph Trunzo

📖 Book Recommendation

The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday

How can we turn trials into triumphs? This is what Ryan Holiday looks to understand. Pulling from some of history’s most know figures, he shows that even in the worst of times, we can learn to leverage it to grow.

📚 Wisdom

“Learning to accept the inevitability of what we fear most is the essential step on the path to a life worth living.“

Christopher Ryan
Source: Civilized to Death

🛠️ Tactical Advice

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Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

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