A Brief History of Acceptance

A few weeks ago I finally watched The Theory of Everything, a 2014 film portraying the life of the late acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking. Aside from the fact that a handful of the featured characters have criticised the accuracy of the narrative, I found it to be an inspirational and compassionate depiction of a great story of resilience, survival, and transcendence.

The story came back to me shortly after as I was reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth (2005), in which Tolle relates an experience he had during an encounter with Hawking at Cambridge University. Read below:

In the late seventies, I would have lunch every day with one or two friends in the cafeteria of the graduate centre at Cambridge University, where I was studying. A man in a wheelchair would sometimes sit at a nearby table, usually accompanied by three or four people. One day, when I was sitting at a table directly opposite me, I could not help but look at him more closely, and I was shocked by what I saw. He seemed almost totally paralysed. His body was emaciated, his head permanently slumped forward. One of the people accompanying him was carefully putting food in his mouth a great deal of which would fall out again and be caught on a small plate another man was holding under his chin. Occasionally the wheelchair-bound man would produce unintelligible croaking sounds, and someone would hold an ear close to his mouth and then amazingly would interpret what he was trying to say.

Later I asked my friend whether he knew who he was. “Of course,” he said, “He is a professor of mathematics, and the people with him are his graduate students. He has motor neuron disease that progressively paralyses every part of the body. He has been given five years at the most. It must be the most dreadful fate that can befall a human being.”

A few weeks later, as I was leaving the building, he was coming in, and when I held the door open for his electric wheelchair to come through, our eyes met. With surprise I saw that his eyes were clear. There was no trace in them of unhappiness. I knew immediately he had relinquished resistance; he was living in surrender.

A number of years later when buying a newspaper at a kiosk, I was amazed to see him on the front page of a popular international news magazine. Not only was he still alive, but he had by then become the world’s most famous theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking. There was a beautiful line in the article that confirmed what I had sensed when I had looked into his eyes many years earlier. Commenting upon his life, he said (now with the help of the voice synthesiser), “Who could have wished for more?”

(Excerpt from A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle, 2005.)

I wonder how many times we look at our lives and say: Who could have wished for more?

Perhaps not often, although if this is not the case with you, I am delighted to be wrong.

Because there is a trillion-dollar industry that thrives in having us wishing for more, and so we continuously complain and ignore the reality that lies in front of us because that voice in our head is telling us that it can always be faster, bigger, better. But by listening to it, we allow our enjoyment of anything to diminish marginally with each step we take forward.

Alan Watts, who also made a big emphasis in the present moment as did Tolle, said that no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now, and I would agree with that.

I love to build things, which tends to produce a natural focus that gears towards the future, and I know for experience that those things that yielded the best results are those in which I enjoy the creative process, rather than those that I have created as a means to an end. Of all the startups I have been involved with, those that failed did so because the founding team was focused on the ending: the money we would get, the benefits we would receive, and none about the process itself. Needless to say, we didn’t enjoy the process either.

Because when connected to the process, we let go of the attachment to the final result, and ironically, as we set our goals free, we allow them to realise themselves, creating results that go beyond what we could have imagined.

It may sound counterintuitive. Society glorifies terms as the struggle, the grind, and no pain, no gain. It also worships those who seem to have it all together, at least superficially, and we actively teach our younger generations to be like them.

The problem is that having it all together is a myth — a widely-accepted one, but a myth nevertheless. Trying to hold it all together means that we should strive to be in control of everything all the time. Therefore it means that we are anxiously worrying about minor details, obsessing about petty technicalities and making sure we are always prepared for worst-case scenarios.

It also means we’re continually interfering with the Universe, because we don’t accept what is. We’re too worried as to what would happen if the idolised vision of ourselves as the master puppeteer crumbles to allow for the unexpected to unfold. Even though the unexpected could have what we truly want, or what we need, or both.

But we can change. And we might start to dissolve this myth by accepting that I or you as mine or your consciousness can only be in one place at once.

Your purpose is to be reading this, right here, right now, the same way my purpose is, at the moment of writing this, to be typing these words. Right here, right now.

And then, in a matter of minutes, we will both move on to something else, and our purposes will diverge, still within the whole of nature, and the big picture will become clear.

The problem is that within the confines of our society and our vocabulary we usually associate the act of surrendering with loss, we associate the act of merely being with being unproductive, with the unfortunate but very real idea that we are no longer the masters of the Universe.

But there is some power in letting go of that notion we might as well recuperate it.

By accepting that things happen, and that reality is, many times, different than the perfect, pain-free picture we were hoping to paint, we can release the idea that something is wrong, which is the main reason that we suffer in the first place.

Quoting David Foster Wallace, from his famous essay This Is Water:

The only thing that is capital T-True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it…You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.

(Excerpt from This is Water, David Foster Wallace, 2005)

Choosing how to see it is how a man like Stephen Hawking, who someone described as suffering from the most dreadful fate that can befall a human being, can also declare, as he did, that we have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the Universe. And for that, I am extremely grateful.

It might be the answer to the mystery of why he lived to be 76 when all the experts said he would not see past 25.

It might also mean that Hawking, who numerous times declared himself an atheist, in his surrendering a quest to find God he might have found it. Not the one at Heaven’s Gate, the image of the big-bearded creator and supreme judge that many of us are taught to follow and be afraid of, but the God that is inside us, the consciousness that doesn’t know about religion or artificial boundaries but about the light within: the one who is present in everyone and everything.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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