Acceptance

Tonight I’m meditating on acceptance.

This is a weary world. Troubled and torn. How can we make our peace with it, or it with us?

We struggle, our brief lives. To accept it all. Fate, destiny, necessity.

Acceptance is surrender in a world which tells us we are perfectly inadequate but inadequately perfect. Acceptance is capitulation in a way of life which tells us war is love but mercy is weakness. Contestants to the last, so we fight until, on our knees, we break.

But acceptance isn’t just surrender. It’s also renunciation. The power to refuse, rebel, defy, challenge, sacrifice, give thanks, grow. And so. Many of our troubles today begin in our inability to see acceptance as not just negative, as surrender, but as positive, as renunciation.

The more that I live, fail, struggle, the more that I think: our way of life is backwards because it handles acceptance backwards. The great spiritual maladies — loneliness, futility, alienation, nihilism — are all born of a backwardsness of acceptance.

Ourselves, others, death. That’s how we suppose acceptance works. And that’s why struggle with it so. Death, others, ourselves. That’s a truer path to acceptance. We think that we must accept ourselves if we are to live. But the truth that those who’ve walked in the valley of the shadow know is: we must accept death if we are to accept ourselves.

When we deny death, all that we really produce is grinning despair. Despair pursues its consolations and seductions. Throws its days away in conquest, triumph, combat. Believes that any surrender is capulation. And so it fights. For the lover, the prize, the legacy. But we know, still, deep in our desperate hearts, we will lose the last battle.

That is why we can’t accept others until we accept death. We must know, deep in our spirits, that they are fighting the same battle we are. We are brothers and sisters at war. A war that can’t be won. And so each of us must lay down our arms, and make peace in our own ways.

I see this in so many places and faces. Those who can’t accept death can’t accept others. They see enemies in every shadow, adversaries around every corner. Every man for himself. Isolation, alienation, loneliness. They’re desperately playing a game, of superiority, competition, that they must win, at all costs. Else the fragile self shatters.

But that’s the point.

Something has to shatter us, break us like glass, split us wide open. For our true selves to be revealed to us. Our frailties, flaws, fragility. Our weakness and foolishness and pride. All those must be stripped naked and held up to the light of being. For us to begin to see ourselves as we truly are.

And so those who can’t break, shatter, split wide open, fail ultimately to accept themselves. Because they cannot accept others, they cannot admit, allow, concede any weakness in themselves. Why should they?

But that is all we are, you and I. Weakness, fragility, falling.

And that is our truest strength. Empathy, courage, freedom, rebellion, defiance, imagination, grace, love. All these are products not of our strength, our cunning, our superiority. But of our impossible fragility and frailty. It is knowing — never denying — the ever present certainty of fallibility that sparks them. They are the miracles which live in us. But the question is whether we hold on to them.

We can’t accept ourselves until we accept others. We can’t accept others until we accept death.

All this. It’s enough. For any life.

There are many ways of life. But not all ways of life are ways of living. Let us be wise enough to know the difference, and true enough to accept it.