Life's like that: What is radical acceptance and how can you get there?

My heart raced as fast as the elevator after I pressed floor number 10 on the control panel. It had been just two weeks—it feels like two years, though—since I last saw my daughter and grandson. Alighting from the elevator, I almost tripped in the dark corridor as the light sensors took a while to function.

“Watch out,” wifey cautioned. “Why do you get excited unnecessarily? You are too old to get overwhelmed by every silly thing that happens in the universe. Control yourself. For God’s sake, show some maturity.”

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I have long erased the word ‘argue’ from my vocabulary. A metamorphosis that even surprised me. It had been a long process, helped in part by my therapists. Such sessions, during which I intentionally maintained a calm demeanour, typically ended with the question, “Did you understand what I said?”

“Yes, I do. I will go over it again,” I would say.

Strangely, the last session a couple of weeks ago ended differently. As I sipped the last drop from the latte cup that I always carried to such places to avoid any awkward postures, the therapist, as usual, concluded: “Did you understand?”

“I always did, no?” I shot back.

“Understanding is not enough anymore, Suresh. You are in such a sensitive and complicated predicament you now need to move beyond that stage.”

“Could you explain, please?”

“You now need to graduate yourself to ‘radical acceptance’. Mere understanding may not work for you. Understanding need not necessarily be followed by an action. You can just understand and then forget it,” she continued. “Understanding need not yield results. It's a dead end.”

“In radical acceptance, you explore a mindfulness approach to embrace your reality, trauma, or experiences, and find inner peace in the process,” the therapist said.

“Kinda like nirvana?” I chuckled.

“In your case, maybe. You aren’t traumatised; you are just unequivocally accepting the reality around you with your mind, body, and spirit, and dedicating yourself to assuaging the feeling of others. You cannot be selfish anymore. You need to rise above tangible desires.”

“You aren’t pushing me to sainthood, I guess,” I said, and burst out laughing.

“It isn’t a joke, Suresh. Radical acceptance is the only way to lift yourself  from the whirlpool of helplessness, unhappiness and sadness you are drowning in. You cannot change the reality, so better churn out some positivity from the maelstrom. That’s your way forward.”

“Ring the doorbell darling.” Wifey seemed to be losing patience. “You are getting lost in thoughts. Don’t know what kind.” We had reached daughter’s place.

“Let’s not ring the bell; the baby might be sleeping.” I knocked on the door gently. There wasn't any reply. Knock, knock. Knock, knock. “Hey, are you there?”

Vava opened the door heavy-eyed. I waited to hear my daughter’s idiosyncratic hooting in joy but was disappointed by her not-so-friendly body language.

“How come suddenly? I was putting the baby to bed. Come in, but keep your volume down, dad.”

“We were just looking around for a 2BHK,” wifey explained.

“But why didn’t you guys call before coming? Didn’t you learn this home visit etiquette during your Singapore days?”

She was right. In Singapore it’s considered rude if you gatecrash or call on someone without sufficient intimation — something which friend Valsala recited on day one from her scrapbook of ethics.

But Vava is not ‘someone’ in my life. She is my darling daughter. Don’t I have the right to barge in whenever I miss her? As much as she has the right to call me with  little notice and ask to be taken for a long drive because she feels low? Is it a clash of generations or the last vestiges of her postpartum depression?

Back in time, when there was no phone in my Indian hometown, we never intimated anyone about home visits. In fact, we were happy to surprise and to be surprised.

On sunny weekends, when we spotted our aunts, uncles, or cousins at the farther end of our walkway, we would sprint to usher in them by holding their hands. Not necessarily out of love, but such reunions would bail us out from laborious school homework and house chores. We felt liberated on such occasions.

“Surprisingly, you don’t seem agitated this time,” wifey said as we walked back into our car. “Vava could have handled the situation in a different way,” she hinted.

Vava would have been exhausted taking care of her baby and just about to get a well-deserved nap when we knocked. She would have had her usual migraine attack or pain in the neck. I probed all probable reasons to comfort myself.

For some reason, I didn’t feel bad at all at the rejection. The practice of radical acceptance has given me comical strength to laugh at experiences that are tragic or unpleasant in a common man’s perspective.

An emotional castration, indeed.