Barcelona: Day 51 : Acceptance .

So I was about to jump in the shower and initially had something really good to write about regarding the topic of acceptance. Of course, once I sat down with the intent of actually writing it, all profound revelations had erased themselves from my mind... I'm hoping that maybe if I just start writing, the rest of the thoughts will eventually meander their way back into my head.


And after a few minutes of pondering, I think I may have again found what I was looking for. The acceptance I am thinking of is not so much that of friendship or communal groups. Rather, it is a different kind of acceptance. I think that inside everyone there is a sort of demand for personal acceptance. To be accepting of yourself, your physical and emotional qualities. And without loving oneself, how can we even begin to love another? The other type of acceptance that comes to mind is that of death. The knowledge that it will happen. And that that date is not predetermined, yet could still happen at any moment.

I think that it's certainly not uncommon for people to have self-esteem issues, confidence issues, lack of personal faith, etc. Just ask any teenager, any high-schooler, even any college student -- I'm pretty sure that they will have a list of things to spew that they don't like about themselves. Or perhaps that is just the way I interpret it given what I went through during those years, and still often encounter.

For me there is always a desire to be better. Every morning I find that I can wake up and look in the mirror, and look myself in the eyes, and say that I can be better than I am right at that moment. There is never a sigh of satisfaction, never a moment of contentment. Physically, you can always train to lift more, run faster, bike harder, and push yourself to your physical limits of exhaustion. I love getting physical exercise and I feel that it is in those times of exercise or athletics where my mental strength hits its peak. But at the same time, there needs to be a point where you are happy with where you've gotten after all of that. And I don't believe I've yet found that point.

I'm also extremely competitive, and as a result anything I do, academically, musically, or whatnot, can always be improved. It can always be tweaked. It can always be, 'fixed,' if you will. I don't know if there will ever be a point of personal acceptance for myself. There are certainly things that I like, but I will never be fully satisfied; instead I think that I will always yearn and hunger for more. Where I will find it, I haven't a clue.

And then there's death. What if all that we do and have worked for up until this point is for naught because I die in a car crash tomorrow. What if I went to Spain and the plane crashed. Or on one of the trips, I stepped onto a plane and never got off, because I left entirely to go to a different world. Every day in the news, the top stories are those of failure, violence and brutality. We could very well be the next day's news story. Murder, vehicular homicide, drunk driving incident, freak accident. They happen.

At times I am terrified of death. But I think it's something that needs to be realized, accepted, and even embraced. The things that we leave behind are not the things that matter. They are not the things that we need, even. And yet we desire to hold on to these earthly things.

In the end, that's what they are, right? Things.

The more I convince myself of this fact, the less afraid I become of dying. The fear comes most in the unknown. The fact that no one really knows what will happen... I think I'd rather just cross that bridge when I get to it. I'm not going to let fear of death get in the way of living my life. After all, I've accepted it.