The day is emerging in the same damp gloom that characterized yesterday but with rain in the mix. The gulls are happy. Mulrooney is not. Me? I’m working hard at acceptance, a word I’m just beginning to understand.
“Some people think acceptance means giving up,” a friend said yesterday. I used to lean toward that definition with the phrase “Just accept it,” one that I usually accompanied with a shrug. This fell into the category of “Offer it up,” an admonition that told little Catholic children to emulate Job. Bear your misfortunes with equanimity and thank God you’re alive. Since this is a difficult achievement for a seven-year-old, which is when one becomes responsible for one’s sins and faults, it was easier to sink into an imposed form of resignation that reeked of defeat. As a rebellious child, I developed an aptitude for change, rather than acceptance, and this skill was well sharpened by the time I became an adult.
Change is a word I’ve always welcomed, with its connotations of self-determination and fresh beginnings. And I’m not alone. It’s the American Way. We’re a country built by people who were unhappy and sought to change that fact by crossing an ocean, pushing into a new continent, and then forcing our way across it. Although history praises the settlers, if it weren’t for the ones who looked for change, we’d all still be living in the original thirteen colonies. It was those who refused to “settle,” to “accept,” who made Manifest Destiny a truth, not a concept.
Now that there’s little new territory to light out to, we’re still divided into the ones who settle and the ones who are driven by the thought of change. In fact even the settlers embrace that thought which is one that drives our economy. Change propels demand. Don’t like your house, buy a new one. Tired of your automobile, visit a used car lot. Hate your hair color, buy a new shade. It’s a fact that if acceptance was enshrined as a virtue in the same way that change is, our stock market would plummet in a millisecond and the whole world would lose the lifestyle that it yearns for.
Then Covid-19 came to town, an unchangeable truth that forced acceptance as the only form of protection. All over the world, people chose isolation over death. Staying home, avoiding others, wearing masks that concealed smiles and muffled speech, forestalling travel, even on a city bus--these habits became so pervasive that they threatened to turn into behavior and when they were no longer necessary, they still had made acceptance an ingrained part of human life.
I’m one of the millions of aging people that populate the world and for our demographic, Covid was a thief. Although it took years of possibility from everybody, it brought me and others of my generation closer to a sense of mortality. Death is no longer abstract. It’s a certainty.
This is a lot like being crammed into a time machine and spat out into the future. While my mind still was adjusting to the fact that I’d turned seventy, my body was well on its way to the next decade. Minor illnesses hit me with greater force, an accident on a city street made me think of buying a cane, flagging eyesight forced me to wear eyeglasses, my sags and wrinkles were impossible to ignore, and my body had gleefully accepted the law of inertia.
These are changes that I don’t welcome and am unwilling to accept. Although the past years pushed me into unknown territory, I’m trying to find what is a realistic way for me to live and what is simply absurd. I swallow pills that might forestall cardiac problems, limited eyesight, and fragile bones. I’ve bought an airline ticket that will take me across the Pacific and back again, with the promise of more travel to come after. I make plans with friends that will propel back into motion and the world at large.
But I’m halfway toward eighty. My Covid habits have become comfortable and my physical alteration inexorable. There’s a degree of acceptance that lurks under my need for change and I’m struggling to understand what that means.
Since I’m a person who turns to reading when I’m puzzled, I’ve begun my search for meaning there. “Lose what I lose to keep what I can keep,” May Sarton advised in a sonnet on what she called “this strangest autumn.” The resignation in this wasn’t a welcome signpost and I moved on, floundering until I came upon Abigail Thomas’s Still Life at Eighty.
These short crisp essays were written during the imposed isolation of the Covid years, a period when Abigail worked to put her truncated isolated state into words that made some kind of sense. Her enforced confinement led her to the word “acceptance,” which seems to have been as alien to her as it is to me. Even though her life has been one of sensuality and connection with the external world, she was raised in a household of scientific inquiry and rigorous thought and her mind has been shaped into a habit of research. She turned to the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots and delved into the words that gave birth to what we call “acceptance.”
“A thread used in weaving,” was the meaning of one of the words it’s derived from, she discovered, and when I read that, acceptance made sense to me in a way it never had before. With this as part of its root system, acceptance, instead of hope, becomes the opposite of despair. While hope is a flame that needs to be tended to stay alive, while acceptance is an active task that weaves a thread into the fabric, over and over again.
Handwoven textiles are one of my passions and it made me happy to see my life as a piece of Thai cotton stretched out on a loom as a work in progress, rough and sturdy, with a bright and colorful pattern. I was the one who placed each thread and if I wove one into the fabric sloppily without caring, the piece was marred in that spot. If I stopped altogether, feeling this was pointless, the cloth would never grow beyond that point, staying frozen in that one place. Picking up a thread and weaving it into the whole, with care and thought, even at times when I disliked the color---that was essential. Taking what I have and making a full life from it when I have no choice but to use that particular thread is at the heart of acceptance.
Recently I put on a pair of prescription eyeglasses that showed me vividly what I’d been missing in clinging to my impressionist point of view. It was like walking through Disney’s Fantasia with colors that popped, even on a grey Seattle afternoon and shapes so sharp that they made me wonder if my glasses were 3-D. Expressions on the faces of people who walked past me were as fascinating as an entire novel and architectural details on buildings I’d dismissed as bland became artful surprises. Then I came home and looked at myself in the mirror.
Without the instant facelift that I’d been given by my bad eyesight, every wrinkle was as obvious as the Grand Canyon. Crow’s feet and crevices--there they were, all mine, along with my blurred waistline and my thighs dimpled with cellulite.
It was too late for Botox, even if I could afford that option. These things were inexorably part of my appearance, and as much as I’ve denied it, they clearly showed who I am, an old woman. As I saw this truth carved into my face, I made my choice. I accepted. I smiled.
And now with that thread in place, I’ll go on weaving, carefully, in my own pattern, with all the colors that come to hand.
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