Is Resignation Actually Surrender?

Sometimes nothing is going to go right. If you are like me, when things go wrong, and when they go wrong too often, when each event follows another with little or no gap between them, I get BLUE, and when I say BLUE I mean Navy Blue.

Obviously good stuff and bad stuff happens all the time to all of us. Even in the fantasy world of movies, the protagonist has to have troubles. The resolution may be a little too perfect, but the conflicts are always there. There is an old writer’s aphorism that goes like this:

Get the protagonist up a tree;
throw rocks at him;
get him back down the tree.


I think one of my bigger problems is in wanting things to be FAIR. If some unfair thing happens, I want to tell the world, jump up on a table, pull my hair, scream, and say, (a famous movie quote: I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!) However, being mad as hell, never makes the unfairness fair. Even in those rare cases where your complaint is the squeaky wheel and you get the grease you were wanting that is redress, but it still is not totally fair because the unfair thing happened. If things had been fair, you never would have needed redress. It is like a murder trial. The killer may get life in prison, or even the death penalty, but that does not make the unfair murder suddenly fair.

Fair not only does not exist, but it is the prime cause for my unhappiness.

I want redress, I want everything to be good all the time, but that does not reflect the reality of life. Good and bad stuff co-exist in life, all life, my life and yours. Some day you are the cat, and some days you are the yarn.

I keep telling my shrink and my wife that I am resigning myself to the way life is. I could moan and complain and fuss, disrupt, and stir the pot, but there are a lot of things in my life that are just not what I want, and maybe not what I deserve. My shrink seems to thing I am settling for less, that what I call resignation is actually surrender, that I am not accepting, I am giving up, giving in, relinquishing, forfeiting, conceding, caving in, submitting, capitulating.

How do you know when it is best to accept, and when is it best to keep plugging away?