Accept - Then Act

 “Accept—then act.  Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it… This will miraculously transform your whole life.”  Eckhart TolleTolle is right.  If I choose something, then I trust that it is somehow a benefit for me, even if only in the long term.  If I choose something, I don’t waste time and energy wishing for a different reality.I am in a two-year IRS audit.  So let’s test-drive this idea: I chose this audit.  Hmmm, how might that be true?  Well, through this audit (now going on three months), I can say the following:I am learning to accept, embrace and actually be grateful for my imperfections and inadequacies.  Through this audit both my accountant and the IRS agent have criticized me.  I have been accused and shamed.  I have been talked to with an exasperated voice. Until this audit, I did not know I still held somewhere inside of me a sense of inferiority and even shame for being so right-brained and not linear or sequential, for how I am made.I have struggled with my strange and random way of being in the world my entire life.  I am not linear.  I have no sense of Chronos time, sequential time, or quantitative time.  I am very present.  I live in qualitative time.  I am deeply aware and connected to energy.  I have enjoyed the gifts of being primarily right-brained.  The right brain makes things whole.  It has a great capacity for wonder, awe and depth.  It is a holy way to experience the world.  But all my life, I have felt somehow defective because I have been so different from people I admire.  My favorite story has been The Ugly Duckling, the story of a swan chick raised by ducks and ostracized for his lack of swan-ness.  Until one day he sees who he truly is, and he is at home in the world.   Stories of exile, like this one, are my story.  These stories might be yours too, but for an entirely different reason.  Most of us, feel somehow “other” or different than most.This audit took me on the journey of exile, and today I am at home in the world as it is and as I am.  I accept both and believe I have chosen to be here and to be here as I am. I am at peace with my unusual self.Where do you need to accept yourself?  But not in spite of how you are made, because of how you are made?