ACCEPTANCE - A GUIDING WORD FOR 2021
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I wasn’t sure if I should bother about having a guiding word for 2021. The concept felt like a futile attempt at taking back some form of control… and control seems to be something we have very little of right now. When I thought back to the start of last year, I couldn’t recall any plans to come up with a guiding word but with cynical hindsight, I can think of several that might be apt for the shit show that turned out to be 2020. They’d just be somewhat lacking on the positivity or inspiration fronts.
So why bother trying to pin down a word this year… isn’t it just another of those wu wu concepts you find lurking within the squares of Instagram? Well yes, but despite my best intentions to go wordless in 2021, it kind of ended up finding me.
During the Christmas break I found myself repeatedly returning to the concept of acceptance - albeit with a maudlin, doom and gloom approach that at the time, I attributed to the bleakness of winter. In moments of seasonal quiet, the melancholy eventually gave way to a softer, less dramatic form of acceptance – most definitely helped by a book I was reading - Self Compassion by Kristen Neff. It had been idling on my bedside table for some time and with silent mornings enjoyed in abundance over the holidays, I found time to devour it in sizable chunks.
It’s one of those books that ends up adorned with sticky notes, highlighted paragraphs and turned down page corners. On the subject of personal failings, which I now realise I’d labelled my sometimes-crippling anxiety as such, Neff wisely states: “Clearly you don’t have complete control over your actions, or else you’d only act in ways that you approved of. So why are you judging yourself so harshly for the way you are?” Succinct, powerful and true. There are also theories on how we should stop to notice our moments of suffering and by not doing so, or worse, by suppressing the feelings altogether, we make things a lot worse.
Neff likens periods of suffering to storms that eventually pass, leaving clearer skies in their wake. That’s not to take away the magnitude of the sorrow or dumb down the pain we experience, but more to ease a pathway through it. The theory sounds easier to discuss than to put into practice but when I relate it to how I felt in the months that followed losing my mum and how I feel a little over two years down the line, it does seems plausible.
As for the here and now that has us entering a third lockdown with schools closed again, I’m willing to try anything that might help our family unit get through to the other side relatively unscathed. Perhaps acceptance is the perfect guiding word for 2021 after all.
When I relate it to the pandemic, it’s taught me that investing precious energy into trying to influence things I haven’t a hope in hell of controlling feels not only futile but leaves me with no energy to think about what might serve me better in the midst of the storm.
I can also apply it liberally to what others might think of me, the choices I make and how I live. Accepting that you can’t control what conclusions anyone may reach about you is surely the first step on the rung of the ladder to caring less about some things in order to care more about others. Perhaps the most challenging forms of acceptance come when you apply it to elements such as body image, self-worth, parental comparison and peer pressure to name but a few.
There’s a lot of work that comes with this word… let’s see how the year pans out.
