Acceptance and Hubris

We struggle with acceptance because we are trained from the beginning that we can always change things.  Our parents, our teachers and the talking heads on the TV believe we control our own destiny.  It is the western ethic.

From the moment we begin to walk we have people saying to us you can do it.  They exhort us to try.  We as a people believe we are special and that that not only can we learn our multiplication tables but we can control the earth and ignore nature.  But the end results of such hubris are those wide swaths of homes and businesses destroyed hurricanes and tornados because we didn’t accept that nature is not beholden to us, not one iota.

As to our personal mechanical and intellectual skill set, we mostly get up and walk.  We get better at language and business skills because we are taught to keep trying, never to accept the mediocre.  The problem is that issues of the heart and soul are much more like natural phenomena that grammar acquisition.  The awareness and acceptance of death or the transitioning of a romantic relationship to something else ties more to being able to accept the immutability of the tides and of the incalculable and unknowable distances between the earth and the stars than it is of learning that 4 x 4 = 16 or that you don’t start a sentence with a preposition.

Acceptance of the most basic things is something nobody trains us. Nobody teaches use how to respond to those things that we all must face, not really.  Acceptance is hard because we have to learn it for ourselves.