When You Might Reach for This
Reach for Release when you have been pushing on something for a while and it has not moved, and you are starting to suspect it is never going to move, and putting it down feels uncomfortably like agreeing that it is fine.
It is not fine. Shikata ga nai has no opinion about whether something is acceptable. It is a question about where your arms actually reach.
Take what feels useful. Leave what does not.
The choice is always yours.
Shikata ga nai
What Is Ours to Change
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
Reinhold Niebuhr
Shikata ga nai is releasing what cannot be changed and returning your energy to what is still within reach.
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of my life trying to change things I had absolutely no control over.
And I have several advanced degrees, including a Ph.D. in psychology. You’d think I would know better.
Apparently, knowing something and actually putting it into practice are two very different things.
I’m still working on that.
Shikata ga nai
what is ours to change
Bad things can happen
we can try to help manage
when help is allowed
Try It Once
Name one thing you wish were different and cannot change. Keep it small. A rained-out plan will do. Then name one thing, however minor, that is still yours to choose. You do not have to feel any particular way about either of them.
Sit With It
Where in your life are you trying to change something that may not be yours to change?
What might change for you if you stopped confusing acceptance with approval?
What Is Shikata ga nai 仕方がない
Shikata ga nai is usually translated as it cannot be helped, which is accurate and does the phrase no favours at all. In English it comes out sounding like a shrug, and a shrug is roughly the opposite of what is meant.
It is not agreement. It does not say the situation is acceptable, or fair, or survivable, or anybody’s fault. It has no opinion on any of that.
What it marks is a boundary, and the boundary runs between outcomes rather than between actions. You can speak, ask, argue, leave, try again, and try again after that. What you cannot do is decide what any of it produces in somebody else.
Finding that line does not make you calm about where it falls. It only stops you spending yourself on the part that was never going to answer.
You are allowed to find the edge and remain absolutely furious about where it is.
A Week with Shikata ga nai
Seven days of putting things down
This week takes things off rather than adding them, and there is less on the page by Sunday than there was on Monday. Start it with something small. A cancelled plan. A decision somebody else made. An opinion you are never going to talk anybody out of. The enormous thing in your life is not the one to practise on.
Day One · Smaller
The largest thing you cannot change is not the one to practise on.
There is a temptation with a week like this one to bring the big one. The situation that has been sitting on your chest for two years. Do not bring that one.
Bring something ordinary instead. The flight that got moved. The meeting that went exactly the way you knew it was going to go. Your brother-in-law’s opinion about schools, which he is going to have again at Thanksgiving. And before anything else, here is what this week is not.
Deciding that something will not change is not the same as deciding it is acceptable. Those two got tangled together somewhere a long time ago and they have never properly come apart. You can put a thing down and go on thinking it is outrageous. Both of your hands are free and your opinion is entirely intact.
TODAY’S INVITATION
Pick one small stuck thing. A disrupted plan, a decision that was not yours, an opinion you are not going to shift.
Not the hardest thing in your life. That one is not for this week, and leaving it out is not you doing the week badly.
Write it down in one sentence, with no opinion attached to it yet.
TONIGHT, SIT WITH ONE QUESTION
What did I choose, and why that one?
Day Two · Sort
Inside a stuck situation there is often a part that is yours and a part that was never offered to you. Most stuck things are not one thing. They are three or four things that turned up together in the same bag, and some of them have your name on them and some of them never did.
The flight got moved, which was not yours. Whether you rebook tonight or in the morning is yours. How your sister feels about the whole business is hers, has been hers the entire time, and was never on offer.
And the line runs between outcomes rather than between actions. You can influence a great deal that you do not control. You can say the thing, make the case, ask for the change. What you cannot do is decide how any of it lands. The question this week is which of your effort is still useful and still yours to choose.
TODAY’S INVITATION
Make two lists. Mine to do, and not mine to decide.
Be honest about the second one even where it holds things you have strong opinions about. A strong opinion is not the same thing as a handle. Then draw a line through the second list. Not through the feelings, and not through anything you might still say or do. Through the outcomes.
TONIGHT, SIT WITH ONE QUESTION
What ended up on the second list?
Day Three · Effort
Effort spent on a part you do not control costs the same as any other effort.
Here is the part nobody mentions. Everything you spend on the second list is billed at exactly the same rate as everything else.
Some of that spending earns its keep. Drafting the message is often how you find out what you actually think. Telling somebody the whole story is sometimes how it stops being fog. The first few times through, the rehearsing is working for you. It is the fourth time, and the ninth, that are worth a look. The pass where nothing new arrives and you are running it again mainly because it is already running.
You will know which is which. It is the version you come out of more tired than you went in.
TODAY’S INVITATION
Find the loop that has stopped giving you anything. The conversation rehearsed to death, the draft rewritten eleven times, the retelling that no longer clarifies a thing.
Take one day off from that one. Just the one. Anything still doing real work for you, carry on doing.
TONIGHT, SIT WITH ONE QUESTION
Which version of it is still telling me something?
Day Four · Down
Putting something down is done with the hands before it is done with the feeling. This is where the week turns, and it turns on something physical rather than something spiritual.
You do not put a thing down by achieving peace about it. You put it down by closing the tab. Leaving the thread. Not answering tonight. Taking the folder off the desk and putting it in a drawer where it cannot sit there looking at you. The feeling arrives later, or it does not arrive at all, and either way the hands can go first.
TODAY’S INVITATION
Put down one piece of it today, using your actual hands. Close the tab, leave the thread, move the folder, mute the thing until tomorrow.
Choose the smallest piece rather than the whole business. If you pick it up an hour later, that is information rather than failure. And if it turns out the thing genuinely needs you tomorrow, pick it up properly. Putting something down was never a promise never to touch it again.
TONIGHT, SIT WITH ONE QUESTION
What did I put down, and what did my hands do instead?
Day Five · Stays
The feeling may not leave when the effort does, and that is not evidence you did it wrong.
Nobody tells you this part, so here it is.
You can do all of it correctly. Sort the lists, stop the loop, close the tab, and still be entirely furious about the thing on Thursday afternoon. The effort stopped. The feeling did not get the memo. That is not the week failing. That is you not faking it. Caring about something you have no way to change is an ordinary situation to be in, it is uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable about it is not a piece of homework you have left unfinished.
TODAY’S INVITATION
Take the requirement off. Nothing about today asks you to feel better about any of it. If the feeling turns up, it can be there without you reopening the file. That is the removal today. Not the feeling. The requirement.
TONIGHT, SIT WITH ONE QUESTION
What did I feel today, with nothing to do about it?
Day Six · Reach
Something usually remains inside your reach, even when it is not the thing you wanted.
What is left is usually not the thing you were reaching for. It sits off to one side, it is smaller, and it is easy to walk straight past on the way to the thing you cannot have.
You may not be able to change the decision. You can decide whether to be in the room when it is announced. You may not be able to fix the schedule. You can eat something beforehand instead of afterward. You may not be able to change what she decides. You can stop asking her every single week, which frees up a genuinely surprising amount of a Sunday.
None of those is a solution, and none of them is nothing. They are the part that was yours the whole time, sitting underneath the part that was not.
TODAY’S INVITATION
Choose one thing that is available to you today, and do that. It does not have to be the one that would fix it. It only has to be yours. If nothing is available today, that is an answer too, and the day is still yours.
TONIGHT, SIT WITH ONE QUESTION
What was actually mine to do?
Day Seven · Left
What is not yours can stay where it is. It does not need you standing over it.
Six days of taking things off. The situation has very likely not changed at all, which is the premise of the week rather than a disappointing result.
What may have changed is how much of it you have been carrying around with you. The rest is still out there, being exactly as unacceptable as it was on Monday. It simply does not require you standing next to it, supervising.
TODAY’S INVITATION
Nothing today. Leave the rest where it is. No reviewing the lists, no checking whether anything moved, no working out what the week meant. Keep the RELEASE card somewhere you may come across it again.
TONIGHT, SIT WITH ONE QUESTION
What is out there right now that does not need me watching it?
Reflection
Shikata ga nai is not agreement. It is finding the edge of your own reach and stopping there, which is a very different thing from deciding that whatever is on the other side is fine.
And you can put something down and go on thinking it is appalling. Nobody checks.
When You Forget
You will forget, and this one forgets by picking things back up.
Not deliberately. Somebody mentions it. A message arrives. You are doing something else entirely and there it is again, fully assembled, with all of its original attachments, and you are back to drafting the reply you are not going to send.
Nothing is lost. There was no practice here to keep up, only things set down, and they can be set down again as many times as it takes.
It is going to be more times than you think.
Make the two lists. Cross out the second one.
That is all of it.
This guide offers reflection, education, and gentle practice. It is not medical or psychological treatment, and reading it does not create a clinical relationship of any kind. The author is not acting as your therapist, your counselor, or your physician.
Fascinating again. I love the way the Japanese seem to identify and recognise those elements of existence we (generally) don't notice, or if we do, we ignore. Yet when one reads and understands the reasoning it makes a great deal of sense. And allows a sense of calm rather than the subconscious build up of tension from acting without reason or failing to act and carrying the burden of missed opportunity. I thank you again for your dedication to producing these lovely windows into the Japanese soul
I learned this phrase from a guy I used to work with years ago and it's been a go-to since. It expresses a fatalism and submission that is antithetical to the Western can-do, hustle-culturing mind, but it's not surrender, it is empowered acceptance.
I'm reminded of another similar teaching from the Hagakure.
“There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything”