Accepting the Struggle

Do you struggle to accept? Perhaps what needs acceptance is the struggle itself.

My body is a microcosm of the earth. I love it. More than anything in the world I want to honor and care for it. And yet many days that seems beyond my capacity. I know I am its caretaker, but it is also a resource I am willing to exploit – ironic as that sounds – in order to survive. In its sometimes still and quiet, sometimes fierce and clamoring voice, it is insistent in its reminder that we are not separate. We struggle together to face what Life asks of us.

My doctor says I should get a new job or at least reduce my hours. I need this job to pay for my healthcare and I know every job has its stressors. No place on the planet is immune from intergenerational trauma or from the market pressures that cause us to make fear-based decisions. The invitation is for me to show up within my job in a different way. The reality of shifting my ingrained reactions is far harder than trying to manifest the fantasy of a life where I don’t have to. But in reality, it is the only path.

I lean into the fear of trusting the team to troubleshoot because I’m sequestered in the serenity of my office. I lean into the resentment over fixing problems created by others because I’m letting go of trying to control everything. I lean into the shame of not holding someone fully accountable because I’m practicing taking small, sustainable bites instead of putting everything on the table. I lean into the ache of not doing enough for myself, for the team, for the planet because at least for today, I’m only willing to give so much.

Acceptance to me is more of a practice than a state, something who’s value comes through aspiration more than attainment. In this way, its like balance. We think of balance as someone in a Zen tree pose, perfectly poised on one leg, eyes closed as the chaos of the world spins around them. But in reality, balance looks and feels a lot more like that other leg and both arms failing wildly to keep from falling over while our hair flies around and eyes bug out. It’s not a pretty picture. But it’s the only way we learn how our body moves in space.

Acceptance for me has a similar movement in the heart and mind. Knowing that it is the goal keeps me from losing my moral orientation, much as balance keeps me from losing my orientation to gravity. My values and ideals are as important as my physical serenity, but I know that when I’m out in the world, things are going to get messy. I’m going to constantly encounter forces that push me off center and being rigid and dogmatic is the best way to ensure someone gets hurt as they collide with the irrefutable ground of reality.

Acceptance, like balance, isn’t something I can bring about with my will. I cannot simply tell myself not to fall any more than I can tell myself I should accept a small confrontation as an adequate victory for someone who was bullied as a child, regardless of how I think an ideal manager should respond. I cannot will myself to simply graciously accept mistakes after years of pursuing perfection as protection from exile. And I cannot will myself to be at peace with the hundreds of thousands of creatures – humans and others – who suffering without safety, nourishment, or freedom everyday. Knowing intellectually that I am powerless makes no difference at all. My thoughts and feelings churn in my body as my arms and legs flail to keep my footing.

Acceptance, like balance, comes from an intuitive, bodily sense of reconciling opposing forces: the forces of my body and the earth, the forces of love and fear, the forces air and fire, stillness and movement, silence and noise, your needs and mine. Somewhere in between all things flow together, but that is not a place we find with our minds, but a space we feel into, like the precise spot in a delta that salt water becomes fresh water. The only clearcut boundaries in nature exist in the human mind. All else is gradation, a “this or that and this and all else.”

What’s being asked of us isn’t to reconcile the tension with a quick fix or solution. What’s being asked of us is to nestle right into the middle of that tension until we realize there’s no conflict at all. There’s just an eternal inhale and exhale between light and dark, above and below, and what I’ve struggled against simply becomes a part of me I’d forgotten about or somehow disowned.

We do not accept as a way of escaping the struggle. We accept Struggle itself as the motor of life, the great oceanic current that mixes freezing nutrients from the deep with the warm crystalline surface generating algae-driven feeding frenzies and tropical cyclones. None of us would exist if our ancestors – of all species – hadn’t braved the dangers of hearts and bodies in close proximity and found a way to exist – if only for a moment – in tenuous harmony. I do not see deeper truths until the fantasies I cling to for dear life collide, crack, and crumble to liberate me.

Acceptance – profound and perfect – comes when we’re dead and Struggle hibernates alongside us while we await our next form. As long as we are bodies, we aspire for harmony we know we’ll never attain, because that is what our hearts require of us. They require us to envision a more beautiful and loving world, a world of abundance, trust and generosity, a world of sovereignty and sanctity for all life, a world of music, dance, art, of deaths and defeats accepted with dignity, of sacrifices made for the greater good, of humility and ferocity each in their right time and place. Our hearts require us to live into this world every day because we know it is right and good. And Life itself shows us this isn’t possible for ourselves, others, or the planet – today or maybe ever.

Is this something we accept? Of course not. We never give up what our hearts and souls dream of because that vision is their food. And yet somehow, in the crucible of Life, this dream mixes with all else that is and some substance, something even more profoundly sacred and mysterious, emerges. I’ve only ever glimpsed it as a passing shadow in the corner of a dream when I am no longer myself. I suspect it holds a ripple of the cosmic dance, something beyond our sliver of propriety and purpose.

So let go of acceptance. Be in the struggle as gawky knees and elbows, knowing that is the only way to feel and grow into that place where all things naturally come together, where something that has been trying to find its way into this world is birthed – always fresh and beyond our darkest, wildest dreams, and yet somehow more perfect than anything we could have imagined.

We are never the ones who accept. Acceptance simply arrives when we have given ourselves over fully to Struggle and simply let ourselves become the soil that all new life sprouts from within.

Nancy

Dedicated to P and L who share with me their struggle to accept.