ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance is a person's assent to the reality of a situation, recognizing a process or condition without attempting to change it, to protest. The concept is close in meaning to 'acquiescence'.

WHAT IS ACCEPTANCE FOR ME?

Honestly, I have never thought about it before. Acceptance was for me… just acceptance. I have never thought deeper about this topic. But now I have decided to expand this thread and think it over a little bit. So, for me acceptance is to make up my mind to do something, even if I don’t like it very much. If we want to accept something, we’ll have to reconcile with the circumstances accompanying a situation but it often isn’t so easy. I sometimes have a problem with this. I often have to think long and hard about something and even then I can barely get myself to reconcile with it. Usually if it’s about acceptance, I have to deal with someone’s behaviour or habits, which disturb me but I’m not able to change them. I see some things, which I don’t like in my character either. A long time ago I realised that I couldn’t do anything about it, so I live with them instead. Acceptance is really important in our lives because every one of us is different. If we don’t accept certain things, we couldn’t live together. I think that is the essence of acceptance.

WHAT IS ACCEPTANCE FOR PEOPLE?

It’s a really interesting thing because every human understands this concept in their own way. There are people, which see acceptance in a similar way to me. I think it’s the most simple and universal method. But this is only a really small part of the world. I noticed that people often connect acceptance with other spheres of life, for example sexuality or religion. This is their first association when they hear about acceptance. Of course I don’t think this is a wrong way of thinking because in my opinion, life is like Math. Everyone has to find their own way to understand some things. But when we talk about those ‘big’ spheres of life, we often forget about those ‘small’ ones like aforementioned behaviour, habits or even appearance. They are all the same and related to acceptance. There are people which don’t think about acceptance because of many reasons. Some of them don’t need it, others prefer to work instead of guessing. But I think that sometimes it’s good to think over something because we could start seeing it in another way. Whichever way we choose, everything boils down to one thing. To understand what acceptance is and why it’s so important to us. If we couldn’t accept other people, we would be really sad and restricted. Everyone needs an other’s presence close to them. And acceptance helps us to live in a harmony with ourselves and our surroundings. Thanks to that we can just enjoy what we have. I think the best assumption here is that ‘nothing happens by accident’. Even if we don’t like something, it inevitably had to be like that. By the way, nothing and no one is perfect. We have to remember that we have many features which other people might not like. This way it should be easier for us to accept some things.

ACCEPTANCE VS TOLERANCE. IS IT THE SAME?

There are similarities between the concepts but there are some differences too. Tolerance concerns religion or culture, which is different than ours. Doesn’t matter if we like it or not. Actually, in some situations, acceptance could be a synonym for tolerance. Deference is that we tolerate something different than what we got used to. And we accept something that we just don’t like. Acceptance and tolerance are similar but not the same.

Korekta: Natalie Menezes
Grafika: Olga Then