We expect catastrophe to break us. We imagine we’d react with panic, bitterness, rage — anything but acceptance. But what if the deepest crises sometimes produce the clearest minds?

Rodrigo Pimentel had a stroke. Not the kind of stroke where someone gradually recovers with minor deficits. The kind where surgeons remove your wife from the room to explain that they successfully removed the clot from your brain, but they can’t tell her if you’ll wake up. If you do wake up, they can’t tell her if you’ll be a vegetable. If you’re not a vegetable, they can’t tell her if you’ll recognize anyone.

Rodrigo woke up. He recognized his wife. But everything else had changed: double vision requiring an eye patch, speech so slurred he could barely understand himself, no fine motor control, unable to walk. The kind of situation we imagine would drive anyone to despair.

His response surprised even him:

“This is what’s happening — there’s no point in being angry or being bitter. And the only thing I can do about it — or rather, in many ways, I can’t do anything about it right now. What I can do is not panic. And not get bitter. All of that will only make me stop… it will only make it worse. This came sort of naturally. I think this is the mindset that I had, this sense — this is what’s happening. This kept coming back to me over and over and over.”

That phrase — “this is what’s happening” — became his anchor. Not “this shouldn’t be happening” or “this is unfair” or “I need to fight this.” Just: this is what’s happening.

What prepared him for such radical acceptance? Years of parkour and long-distance running had taught him something valuable about facing discomfort. In running, he’d learned that the worst strategy when pain hits is trying to distract yourself from it. “What I learned is actually focus into the pain with curiosity — what’s happening, what is in pain and why, what happens if I change things slightly.”

This wasn’t about making the pain go away. It was about refusing to add resistance to what was already difficult. “You sort of get distracted but get distracted in a way that doesn’t feel unnatural,” he explains. Instead of fighting the reality of pain, he’d learned to inhabit it with curiosity rather than panic.

The same approach applied to stroke recovery. Where others might have railed against their new limitations, Rodrigo treated everything as bonus territory: “Everything was a bonus. The way my life was at that point was I couldn’t walk… I could hardly speak, I had my eye patch… that was life. This is where I am right now. Anything else is a bonus.”

This wasn’t toxic positivity or forced gratitude. It was something more fundamental: the recognition that acceptance doesn’t mean giving up, it means working with reality instead of against it. When therapists couldn’t promise him any specific recovery milestones, he didn’t demand guarantees. He simply asked: given that I’m here, what can I actually do?

The independence question reveals another layer. Before the stroke, Rodrigo struggled to accept help — he thought he should be able to handle things himself. But post-stroke, accepting help came naturally because it was obvious he couldn’t do basic tasks alone. “There’s no amount of stubbornness that will get me through this,” he realized.

The clarity was stark: when you literally cannot hold a spoon or stand without assistance, pride becomes irrelevant. Need becomes simple fact, not moral failure.

What’s striking isn’t that Rodrigo recovered well — though he did. It’s that crisis gave him access to a kind of mental clarity that had previously required conscious cultivation through movement practices. The acceptance he’d been building in small doses during difficult runs and challenging jumps became his default state when everything was on the line.

We tell ourselves that extreme circumstances reveal who we “really” are. But maybe they reveal who we’re capable of becoming when the usual resistance falls away. When fighting reality is obviously futile, acceptance stops being a spiritual practice and becomes simple pragmatism.

Rodrigo’s story suggests something counterintuitive: sometimes the worst thing that happens to us removes the barriers to responding with our best selves. Not because we become different people, but because crisis strips away the luxury of resistance we normally carry.

“This is what’s happening” isn’t resignation. It’s the starting point for everything that comes next.

This field note references the Movers Mindset episode “Mindset – with Rodrigo Pimentel,” published December 28, 2023.