Acceptance is not resignation

"Acceptance,” writes the meditation teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn in Full Catastrophe Living, “does not mean passive resignation. Not at all. It means taking a reading of a situation, feeling it and embracing it as completely as one can manage, however challenging or horrible it may be, and recognizing that things are as they are, independent of our liking or disliking and wanting it to be different.” (my emphasis)  Only then, writes Kabat-Zinn, can we take the appropriate action to improve our condition. “A desire for things to be other than the way they actually are is simply wishful thinking,” he writes. “It is not a very effective way of bringing about real change.”

I've thought a little about the "desire for things to be other than the way they actually are" and the quality of the energy of  "wanting things to be different" which is more subtle than I take Kabat-Zinn's "wishful thinking."  It's a unhappy irritant of a feeling.  It's a non-harmonius feeling. And, it's an energy.  

The Kabat-Zinn quotation is from Brad Stulberg's article, "It's okay to be good and not great."

https://thegrowtheq.com/its-okay-to-be-good-and-not-great/