An Odyssey Once in a Lifetime

CHAPTER 01 — The Voyage Begins: Life Does Not Go According to Plan

Do Not Fight the Reality You Cannot Change; Accept It

Whether or not we respond well to a hard situation comes down to "psychological flexibility." This is the capacity to hold on to the purpose of your life while refusing to look away from the pain as you work your way through a challenge. Those who build up this strength eventually reach "home"; those who do not go on losing their way. Growth without any pain at all is as far from reality as the myth of a six-headed serpent. Sometimes we choose a hard journey for the sake of our own growth, the way we choose to change careers. But there are also journeys in which we are given no choice at all - losing a beloved parent, or the end of a relationship we believed was going well. Either way, what your odyssey asks of you is not the skill of avoiding life's challenges but the strength to endure them and go forward anyway.

The concept of "radical acceptance," put forward by the psychologist Marsha Linehan, offers a deep insight into how we meet changes we never wanted. Drawing on the extreme suffering she went through as a young woman on a psychiatric ward, Linehan developed dialectical behavior therapy to help people living with the most severe emotional pain. A dialectic is a way of approaching the truth by examining and discussing opposing ideas together.