It is what it is: why acceptance is the first step forward | Meaningful money

Acceptance is the starting point. Not the end.

Most of us are quick to label things as good or bad.

Want to win the lottery? Good.

Getting fired from a job you helped build? Bad.

And yet history tells a more complicated story.

There are countless lottery winners who later said the money made their lives worse. And Steve Jobs, after founding Apple, was famously fired from the company he founded. Years later, he concluded that his layoff forced him to reconnect with himself and ultimately led him back to Apple, where he changed the course of technology.

What we currently call ‘good’ or ‘bad’ often turns out to be something completely different.

That idea is well captured in the ancient Chinese peasant story. One version goes like this:

A farmer had several horses. One night one ran away. The neighbors expressed sympathy for his bad luck. The farmer replied, “Maybe.”

The next day the horse returned, bringing with it a number of wild horses. “What luck!” said the neighbors. “Perhaps,” replied the farmer.

The next day his son rode one of the wild horses and was thrown off and broke his leg. “That’s terrible,” the neighbors said. “Maybe,” said the farmer.

Soon after, soldiers came through the city to draft young men into the war. They passed the farmer’s son because of his injury. “What luck!” said the neighbors.

“Perhaps,” replied the farmer.

The point is not that nothing matters. It’s that the moment something happens, all we really know is this: it happened.

We don’t know yet what it will mean.

It’s hard to withhold judgment in this way, because people like value judgments.

The moment something happens, we instinctively ask: is this good or bad for me? And what counts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends entirely on our past experiences.

Everything we have experienced creates a kind of filter – a fabric through which new events are channeled before we even realize it.

We do not experience events directly. We experience them through that filter.

Judgments are often accompanied by ideas about how things should be or how they should have turned out. That’s why disappointment, frustration, and regret can feel so sticky.

I sometimes use a simple exercise, the tape measure exercise.

Imagine a measuring tape that represents your life. You cut it at your current age, for example 42 inches if you are 42 years old. You hold that piece of tape, from zero to today, and think about the life you’ve lived so far.

Then pause and notice what that feels like.

Many people say it feels strangely liberating.

The exercise helps illustrate acceptance. Once something is on tape, it’s done. Wishing it hadn’t happened, or hoping for a different past, doesn’t change that. It just costs energy.

That’s what people mean when they say, “The past is the past.”

Acceptance is not about liking what happened. It’s about stopping the discussion with reality.

None of this means you shouldn’t celebrate victories or regret losses.

Life changes. Things that feel great today may feel different tomorrow. Things that feel painful now may look different in retrospect. Recognizing that impermanence can enhance appreciation for the good while it is there, and sometimes it is even for the hard things later.

There’s an old saying about not crying over spilled milk. The point is not that you don’t care that the milk was spilled.

It’s that once it’s spilled, it’s already spilled.

Crying keeps the milk from spilling. Beating yourself up doesn’t work either. Both simply postpone the moment when you start cleaning up.

“It is what it is” doesn’t mean that everything will be fine. It doesn’t mean that you have to pretend that everything is going to be fine. And it’s not a call to look on the bright side.

It simply means this: once something has happened, the past is no longer the problem.

And in the present you still have choices. Acceptance clears the ground. From there, you can respond with purpose, instead of getting stuck and wishing reality were different.

Sometimes that’s the most compassionate move you can make… for yourself.

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