Drama begins where acceptance ends. We make some everyday complications even more difficult with our own reactions. We get caught up in them because we experience ordinary life complications as something that shouldn’t have happened.
We expect people to be reasonable. We expect work to go according to plan. We expect relationships to be clear. We expect effort to yield results. We expect life, even if only occasionally, to go our way.
But reality doesn’t play out the way we imagined, and instead of adapting, we start to resist.
We replay conversations in our heads, interpret others’ intentions, and look for someone to blame. We try to change people who don’t want to change and control circumstances that were never within our control.
One problem spawns ten more of our own making. It wasn’t the event that wore us out. It was our struggle with the fact that it happened. Such resistance only ratchets up the pressure we’re already feeling.
The drama comes later, when the wounded ego begins to write its own version of events in which someone must be to blame, someone must admit a mistake, and reality must be restored to the place we had predetermined for it.
Expectations alone will not change what has happened. Peace, therefore, is not a state in which everything is in order. Peace is the ability to remain true to ourselves even when nothing is going as we planned. Accepting reality does not mean giving up.
It means stopping the waste of energy on what already is, so we can save it for what we can still change.
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