The Way It Is

Purposeful Wanderings - Bradford L. Glass - September 2025

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“If you’re looking for something to be offended by, you won’t be disappointed.”– Wayne Dyer

This is #1 in a five-part series on walking your authentic path in life, a path that offers peace, meaning, well-being, connectedness (with self, others, soul, spirit & world), and freedom. It’s based on two premises I hold strongly: 1) life is an invitation to nurture the ‘seed’ of our unique potential into being, yet 2) we rarely become what life is; we become what we learn life is. And we learn far less about our potential than about what keeps us from it: life “should” be a certain way, we’re somehow not good enough, we need to get things right, be socially acceptable, achieve, not rock the boat. This leaves us feeling isolated, confused, stressed, often afraid. Why wouldn’t it?  We may not know it consciously, but we’re trying to be someone we’re not – at the expense of who we truly are. To walk your unique path is to free yourself from the grasp of old lessons, so you can honor your own truth, instead of fighting so hard to be someone else’s. The steps: accept, discover, envision, manifest, sustain. 

Step I: Accept: 1) “The way it is” just is – everywhere; let go of the judgment; 2) your thinking created “the way it is;” move beyond your stories. If you don’t come to conscious, non-judgmental clarity and acceptance of “the way it is,” you’ll continue to fight with “what isn’t” instead. Let’s look at the underlying story for why this is so.

Hundreds of things happen over the course of a day – events, situations, conversations, issues, even thoughts. It’s “the way it is.” On their own, these carry little emotional charge. But … then … there’s the story we tell ourselves about those events, situations, conversations, issues and thoughts (he did it to me, it’s personal, it shouldn’t be like this, it’s not fair, my day is ruined, she’s wrong). The stories we tell often differ wildly from what happened. Unknowingly, we get attached to our stories. It’s this attachment – not the events – that causes our struggle! Whether 10 years or 10 seconds ago, what has already happened doesn’t care about your reaction. Let it go. This doesn’t mean you “like” what happened; it doesn’t mean your emotions are invalid; it means that as long as you hang onto your stories – as if they mattered – you block yourself from peace, your potential, and life’s [natural, but perhaps inconvenient-to-you] flow. Two aspects of our consciousness are behind this … emotions and stories.

Emotions are part of being human. They’re not “problems,” they’re teachers. They carry messages that ask us to stop, listen and learn … about our thinking. Yet we miss this, tending instead to “run down the street” with our feelings, perhaps even citing them as evidence for the validity of our reactiveness. But if we’re reacting to what’s wrong, we can’t see what’s possible; so we become stuck. The “work”: Come to realize that you can have emotions (opinion, judgment, worry, upset, fear), but you don’t have to become them.  

Stories are our unconscious, habituated responses to old lessons that told us life “should” be a certain way. But life rarely complies … so instead of accepting “what is,” we judge it, then become determined to “fix” it. The story is our need to fix; it evokes emotions … which fuel reaction. But this “reality” is not “what is;” it’s an illusion, a made-up way of seeing and thinking, one living only in our heads. It’s the “comfort zone” we imagined into being to help make us feel safe in an uncertain world. These “what’s wrong” stories keep our world small; we can’t see “what’s possible.” Key point: a story is not the same as the event it reminds you of (whether it’s a flat tire or the loss of a loved one). The “work”: Learn to see life’s events as separate from your stories about them. This clarity creates an opening – for creative genius, resilience, peace. In the process, reactiveness falls to the floor.

Today’s world of information overload, opinion and blame seems to support our reactiveness, not our acceptance … by rewarding convenience, conformity and emotional hysteria over the critical thinking we need to meet life’s challenges. While evolution has left us the only species with the capacity to choose our life’s path, it’s “easier” to react than to engage in conscious, intentional, creative thought. So we risk becoming a threat both to society and ourselves … all the while swearing our reactions are a result of our “thinking.” The missing element in acceptance isn’t knowledge, skill or effort, but awareness. No need for plans, goals, trying, fixing, forcing; just listen and learn.

Exercise: With intentional practice, you learn to listen to your emotions and the stories that evoke them instead of unconsciously becoming them. As you listen, you create distance between the two. Acceptance naturally fills the space you’ve created. Your stance on life softens. (This doesn’t mean you become weak; it means you no longer drain energy reacting to everything). As you learn to see what happened with clarity and objectivity, reactiveness turns to resilience – opening to self-trust. You begin to see “what’s possible,” releasing the trap of “what’s wrong.”

A practice: stop a few times each day, (and maybe right after an “event” if you have the presence to catch yourself then). Replay in your mind how you reacted; then identify the “thought” or story living inside you that triggered the reaction (it’s not fair, it’s personal, etc.), and maybe where the story came from (Dad said life “should” be fair). Then: notice feelings you had … and actions you took; name differences between the event and your story. Lastly, can you identify the “emotional consciousness level” of your response: 4) drama (who can I blame?); 3) facts and events (what happened?); 2) principle (who do I want to be here?); 1) potential(what’s possible now?). No need to change anything; noticing does the work. By identifying the consciousness level at which you respond, you’re drawn naturally to a higher-level response. You might then ask which level of response you “want” to become.   (This consciousness model courtesy of Alan Seale.)

If you connect with the book recommendation below, you’ll notice Pema Chödrön suggests three things to help you become more accepting: 1) look for what’s “touching” in others (love, pain, hardship) and connect silently, heart to heart, with them; 2) look at where you say you failed; ask how “failures” could become teachers instead; and 3) allow yourself to connect with where and how you see yourself as vulnerable; allow it to teach you instead.

Life Lessons from Nature: Rivers are the veins and arteries of the earth, carrying its life force from mountains to sea, so that it may again be returned in the endless cycle that sustains life on our planet. Rivers offer a powerful metaphor for our lives, too, providing us ways to understand our place in the world, and restore meaning to life. Nature doesn’t have a goal; it just is. Rivers don’t try to get to the sea; they just do. In so doing, they leave behind a beauty on the land that has captivated writers and poets for centuries, and provides us with comfort and peace.

You might sit by a river for an hour or so. Observe the way the water finds its way around rocks. Notice how water doesn’t stop to fight everything along the way; it just does what it does (being a river), and flows around anything in its path. There’s no stress, no complaining, no problem about the rocks; they’re just rocks. Rocks don’t have a problem either; they aren’t ‘being difficult,’ or fighting back at the river.  There is peace here, even despite its sometimes-turbulent face. The river gets to the sea. Rocks are worn smooth by its presence.

So, too, in our lives. We needn’t stop to fight with all of life’s obstacles. In fact, they’re “obstacles” only because we named them such. It was a choice. We could just as easily choose to accept that life’s path contains rocks. It’s just “the way it is.” Instead of seeing rocks as interruptions to life, we could ponder what we might learn from them, asking perhaps, “What does this experience have to offer me in terms of how I choose to live?”… and then simply go around, wiser for the contact.  

Book of the month: Welcoming the Unwelcome, by Pema Chödrön.  A nearly perfect accompaniment to this month’s ideas. When you consciously welcome the unwelcome (challenges, issues, edges, fears), the awareness you gain begins to soften your stance, simply because you see consciously that life goes as it goes, not just how you want it to go. This frees you to join that natural flow that life is … and always will be.  A huge opening to creative genius, less stress, freedom … and peace. If you’re fighting with any aspect of your life, it’s a fight you made up by the way you’ve come to see and think.