Christy Writes: On Acceptance
It’s 6 a.m. and I am sipping milky coffee and squinting out the window at the rain like it’s hooligans on my lawn. I’m contemplating trying to make it to my 6:30 yoga class, but the studio is a mile’s walk away and my overarching thought is how much I hate doing yoga in wet clothes. I sweat like a lumberjack as it is. And it’s not just drizzling out there, it’s a monsoon. In here, on the other hand, there’s coffee, a purring cat, David Arkenstone on the stereo, and a sandalwood candle I’ve just lit in an apparent attempt to entice myself to stay home and write instead. I settle back into my writing chair. I’m remarkably persuasive.
Acceptance.
It seems I’ve spent most of my life struggling mightily against the invisible restraints of whatever is, automatically fighting any decision I perceive as having been made for me, determined to decide for myself.
Occasionally that works. But more often, for me anyway, it leads to more conflict and upset because, let’s face it, sometimes what is is what’s going to be and fighting it just makes it dig in deeper. My irritation at this morning’s rain hasn’t parted the clouds so I can make my way to yoga like Moses crossing the Red Sea. If anything, I think it’s raining harder now.
Acceptance.
I’ve lately begun to learn the difference, and there is one, between acceptance and giving up. Giving up is a negative surrender. A fine, I don’t care, whatever. Acceptance is an embracing of what is, an alrighty then, let’s see where this goes. Accepting something doesn’t necessarily mean you like it, just that you’re open to what it has in store for you.
Guy’s first cousin Glenn was diagnosed a couple of months ago with advanced esophageal cancer. Everyone continually referred to Glenn’s “battle” with cancer, but it was from Glenn that I learned the most profound lesson about acceptance – not as an abstract, sounds-good concept, but in a real life, watch-this kind of way.
I don’t think any of us took his diagnosis as well as he did, including me. I love Glenn – he was always supportive of my writing projects, he found me hilarious, and he bequeathed his vintage Aqualung album to me last Thanksgiving. His initial response to his diagnosis I don’t know. That went on inside Glenn’s own mind. Early on, we all tried to buoy his spirits – as well as our own – with positive sentiments. You’re going to beat this thing! You’ll outlive us all! Meanwhile, in the way those closest to the stricken tend to do, we prayed for a miracle and braced for the inevitable.
The miracle, it turned out, was Glenn. Knowing his cancer wasn’t curable, he accepted it and instead brought his focus to his three children, his friends, his extended family, his community, his life as it was now presented to him. What could have been a wrenching, exhausting, prolonged goodbye for all of us turned into a weeks-long celebration of Glenn. I’ve never seen such an outpouring of love. Every person Glenn touched with his wonderfully huge laugh and his kind heart cropped up to tell him so. He was interviewed on the radio, the television, and in the newspaper, now weak and thin and struggling to talk, but always smiling and reminding everyone to give back, to love, to live. His friends took over Facebook to such an extent I kept expecting him to show up as a trending topic.
This Tuesday, he posted a link to Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” And then he died. And it was like we were all carrying him out on our shoulders, crying and cheering.
Acceptance.
As I’ve come to understand the whisper-thin line between acceptance and giving up, I’m finding more and more ways I can be accepting in my own life, and how truly empowering that is, how freeing, and how beautifully it allows me to live in the moment and to appreciate what poet Lucille Clifton calls “only here, only now.”
Acceptance.
The rain this morning is so beautiful.
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