Accept it How It Is

Most people, as you’re showing by reading this post, are interested in becoming widely successful individuals with great business, personal and spiritual lives, or at least something close to that. We want to be the best and get to the very top.

But like it or not, when you’re going to the top, you find yourself a long way from the ground so when you fall, you fall far.

Elvis is one of the most successful men in history; he broke records that stand over thirty years after his death, let alone when he set them. And he had a legion of adoring fans. At one time, he even had a perfect (seemingly anyways) family.

But when you’re at the top, you can fall a long way. His marriage broke up, his physical shape deteriorated. It must have distracted him because even his musical success was not what it had been.

What hurt Elvis more was not the event of, say, his marriage breaking up but how he reacted to that event and how that event then ate into other places in his life.

Man that sounds terrible! But it’s unavoidable, right?

Yes and no; The bad stuff will happen, but you don’t have to give up on life because of it. A way of staying positive when this happens in your own life is accepting an event how it is.

Robert Schuller, founder of the Crystal Cathedral, put it wonderfully in one of his books about positive thinking. He said that if you look at life as an experiment, there can’t be bad or good. There can only be feedback. And the nice thing about feedback is you can learn from it for more successful trials in the future.

When something bad happens to me, I have a little breathing technique I do to get over it.

You want to know what it is?

Alright, let’s do it together… Take a deep breath and… let it go. Let it all go. All the pain, the suffering. Everything that happened yesterday that still haunts you today, even when it logically is past.

What?

Let it go. It sucks and we hate it and if we could change it, we would. But for now, it’s over. That’s the nice bit about the past; we can learn from it and use it to guide our present to a better future, but it’s done.

We either catch the next ball and forget the shot we missed or we throw the whole damn game away because of one stupid play.

Elvis went into a decline over his marriage with Priscilla that only death stopped. We can learn from the pain he endured by realizing that the only way to get out of a really sucky past situation is to learn from your mistakes, take a deep breath and keep going.

I hope this article will help you keep going, no matter your past.

Elvis’s Lessons:

• When something bad happens to you and keeps on holding you back, even when it’s far in your past, take a deep breath and keep going. You can learn from the past, but you can’t live in it. Living is for the present, and the present shapes the future, not the past. Skip the suffering Elvis had over his broken marriage and learn to accept the situation how it is, and keep going as best you can.

P.S. If you’re interested in seeing Elvis from those good years before he accepted the desperation of his broken marriage, here’s a clip of “Patch it Up” from the 1970 documentary, Elvis: That’s the Way it Is.