Sweet Bites
February 2, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with some thought-provoking finds to send you off into the weekend with.
This week we close out our January exploration of fate with the topic of acceptance. Below are the Monday Meditations and Wednesday Wisdom for this week:
Any of the below bites resonate? Hit the reply button and let me know.
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🦉 Wisdom
“He who wishes to take control of the world and acts upon it,
I can see that he will not succeed.
For the world is a divine vessel,
It cannot be acted upon as one wish.
He who acts on it fails.
He who holds on to it loses.
Therefore some things move forward while some follow behind.
Some try to warm with exhaled air while some try to blow it cold.
Some are strong while some are weak.
Some are successfully accomplished while some are declined and failed.
Thus, the saint avoids all extremes, extravagance, and pride.”
Lao Tzu
Source: Tao Te Ching
🦉➕ Wisdom (Bonus)
“It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The future has no ambitious possibilities hidden in its womb; the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.”
William James
Source: The Dilemma of Determinism
🛠️ Tactic
I really enjoyed this article by the psychologist Joshua Coleman in Aeon on embracing “radical acceptance”.
“Radical acceptance emphasises the importance of facing our present condition in all of its awful implications. Statements such as ‘This isn’t fair,’ ‘I don’t deserve this,’ ‘This isn’t how it’s supposed to be,’ however true, only heighten our suffering… In these moments, we can either get worked up into a frenzy over the injustice of it all – or take a deep breath and accept that it is what it is, and that it’s beyond our control.”
This idea of radical acceptance is similar to what Nietzsche meant when he spoke of amor fati, which we discussed in our Monday Meditations this week. It is also in line with what the Stoics 2,000 years ago meant when they said to embrace fate and accept the things outside of our control.
🏋🏻 Exercise
Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive, To Sell is Human, and The Power of Regret, provides the following three tools for processing regret and learning to accept outcomes in our lives which we may not be so happy with.
Turn Inward
How do you look at your regret? Is your self-talk loathing or is it filled with self-compassion? We want to lean into self-compassion. Self-compassion provides us space to heal and accept the things in our lives we’re not happy with.
Look Outward