Reality Only Takes Yes for an Answer

There’s often a short window between realizing the right thing to do and doing it, where a person goes crazy for a bit.

For example, I went temporarily mad the other day after getting home from the gym. The garbage truck had left the bin in front of my parking spot, so I had to get out and move it. I parked, unloaded my things, carried them up to my second floor unit on my wobbly quads (it was leg day), then I plopped into a chair to take a breath.

Then I remembered I had groceries in the trunk. I actually said “No!” aloud when I realized, the way you say “No!” when you drop a meatball on your pants.

I’ve made many exclamations like that, but this time, in the silence that followed, the absurdity of it struck me. Who was I saying “no” to? The groceries were still in the trunk no matter how I felt about it. I was scolding reality, like it was a dog that had misbehaved. “No, Reality! Bad! Don’t make me go down to the car again, Actual Situation!”

This thought was funny enough that I dropped my grudge altogether, after maybe three seconds of real anger. I let go so completely that going back down to the car actually felt good, like a fun little mission. Embracing the right thing feels much better than doing it begrudgingly, wobbly legs or no.

Crazy as it is, it’s a common human reflex to insist reality is wrong for a short time before ultimately accepting it. You might say “No!” — aloud or internally — when you drop your ice cream cone, when your tax return comes back owing, or when the call on the field is a fumble. Something in the human mind grasps at an impossible level control over reality. It wants God’s job.

Whether you protest a given setback or not, you do get to act in response to what has happened. You can go get the groceries, or let them wilt in the trunk. You can buy another ice cream cone, or eat it off the ground, or consider it empty calories avoided.

Staying in grudge mode will probably make you less likely to do the right thing, whatever it is. It will certainly make you less able to enjoy doing the right thing.

It doesn’t matter whether the setback is your fault, either. If my groceries had been carried away by raccoons instead, I’d still have to respond, whether I spent a few minutes cursing the raccoons, or my forgetfulness, or neither.

That moment of insanity, where you try to command reality to be different, might be unavoidable. But it makes sense to shorten it as much as possible, and move on. Otherwise the mind starts building out its manifesto. If I hadn’t dropped my reality-grudge after a few seconds, I might have gone on grumbling about how the whole day was going wrong, how next time I’m getting a ground floor unit, how houses are so expensive these days because of bad regulatory policy and so on.

You might know people who seemingly spend their entire lives preoccupied by a grand narrative of reality’s wrongness. We all do some of that, but if you let each setback’s madness phase carry on into the next one, all of life feels wrong, which is unbearable. People experience varying amounts of misfortune, but how consumed by resentment they are seems to have little to do with it. Some endure unbelievable bad luck and don’t succumb to resentment, and others would be angry with any life given to them.

I think the difference is wisdom. Wisdom might be reducible to “how able you are to meet reality as it is and act accordingly.” A lack of wisdom is grasping at levels of control you don’t really have.

For example, I get mad at road construction for being part of reality. I start theorizing about how the city schedules construction contracts badly, or how crews need to work night shifts or longer hours, even though I don’t know the first thing about construction scheduling. What’s really happening is that I’m rationalizing my grudge with reality, because it isn’t letting me speed down the road unimpeded. I’m making up stories to explain how reality must be unfolding on the wrong timeline, because I’m stuck in traffic. Completely insane and very common.

Another way to think about this is that we’re always operating in one of two modes: saying yes to reality and acting accordingly, or protesting reality because we don’t want to act accordingly.

Either way, some wiser part of us senses the right thing to do, and we can only say yes to it or no to it. Reality is often unsympathetic, but it doesn’t misbehave, only we can do that.

The more I think about reality’s non-negotiable nature, the more I understand where the great spiritual traditions came from. I have some experience with three of them (Buddhism, Stoicism, and Christianity) and they all make a similar proposition: in every moment you’re being called to do the right thing, the wise thing, but it’s up to you to say yes. If you will be liberated from your struggles, it will be by learning to always say yes with minimal fuss.

Reality isn’t just a lottery of random events you need to navigate. It’s more like a moral pattern that repeats itself, continually speaking to the wise part of you. You can dutifully go where it leads you, or you can tell it no, I have other plans.

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