When you find you can’t Uketamo, Uketamo the you who cannot Uketamo. – Master Hoshino

In what is another one of his seemingly paradoxical phrases, I heard something I had never heard from Master Hoshino:

Try as you might, there are just some things we might never accept. And that’s fine. We just have to accept that version of ourselves. We have to accept that we can’t accept.

There are some very obvious examples of this.

The first one that came to mind for me is the death of a loved one. We can never fully accept something as tragic as this. And that’s fine. We don’t have to. In that case, it’s fine to accept that we will never be able to accept it. We can find solace in that.

Uketamo is about acceptance. That much is true. But Uketamo has its limitations. Like everything else, Uketamo is not bulletproof. But Uketamo does bring us much closer to finding peace than not.