“This soup is cold.”
Since reading Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth,” I have often uttered this phrase in response to difficult circumstances. The line comes from a section in the book where Tolle presents the following scenario: he orders a bowl of soup in a restaurant and it is cold when it arrives. At this point he has several options, but really it boils down to two: accept the reality or fight against it. Choosing to accept it does not mean he cannot inform the waiter that he would like the soup heated up. It simply means that he does not take the scenario personally.
For Tolle it is about the ego. “The ego,” he says, “loves to complain and feel resentful not only about other people, but also about situations. What you can do to a person, you can also do to a situation: make it into an enemy. The implication is always: This should not be happening; I don’t want to be here; I don’t want to be doing this; I’m being treated unfairly. And the ego’s greatest enemy of all is, of course, the present moment, which is to say, life itself.”
When I say, “the soup is cold” I am practicing what we therapists sometimes refer to as “surrendering.” I prefer the term “radical acceptance.” It is the “accept the things I cannot change” part of the serenity prayer. The waiter did not do anything to me, just as life is not out to get you. We can blame, shame, and complain all day long and it will do nothing to improve the situation. A better path is to simply decide if we are going to eat cold soup or go heat it up.
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