Who Can Accept It?

Anyone familiar with twelve-step programs knows the serenity prayer, which asks for the serenity to accept what we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. As often and as widely as it has been repeated, it has not been flattened into cliché because it is such a sturdy, serviceable prayer, anchored in real wisdom about what we need as we go our bumpy ways. Real acceptance is neither passive resignation nor simple capitulation, but active, imaginative, open-hearted reframing of what is given us to work with.

I’ve often found curious comfort in the little tautology “It is what it is.” It seems a gentle way of relinquishing false hope and taking stock of facts. Once we have those facts clearly in front of us, we can work with them—reconsider, reframe, reorient ourselves.

A friend of mine with a mysterious chronic ailment that had remained undiagnosed for years appeared on my doorstep one day exuberant—not because she had found a cure, but because she had a diagnosis. She knew now that what she had was a rare form of a chronic illness that couldn’t be cured but could be managed. She couldn’t change the fact of the illness or the likelihood of the prognosis, but she did have a new sense of direction upon which to base her strategies of daily life. She knew her limits and accepted them as the boundaries within which she could exercise her considerable creative energies, budget her time, enjoy her friendships, and rest when she needed to. . . .

Those of us who can afford even these luxuries have sources of human hope many don’t. One reason to travel by TV or others’ stories to areas of the world where people live in unimaginable poverty is to witness their humbling endurance, which defeats despair, and their astonishing acceptance, which allows them to make the next meal of a small bit of rice or cornmeal and serve it with dignity. They teach us acceptance and humility even as they remind us to work more zealously to change what we can.

Marilyn McEntyre, Word by Word. Taken from Give Us This Day.

Marilyn McEntyre is author of numerous books on language and faith, including Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies and Make a List: How a Simple Practice Can Change Our Lives and Open Our Hearts.