Acceptance

Acceptance can mean a lot of different things to different people. This is what Wikipedia says, ‘Acceptance in human psychology is a person’s assent to the reality of a situation, recognising a process or condition without attempting to change it or protest it. The concept is close in meaning to acquiescence, derived from the Latin acquiēscere. ‘ So is this what it means to me? There are many things in life that I have had to accept whether I wanted to or not, like losing my home and having family members die. You can’t do much about that and have to accept that it has happened. But there are many other things I find hard to accept and I think this holds me back sometimes.

After an accident while out on my cycle when I was 18, my physical health has slowly deteriorated. I have tried hard to deal with the arthritis and the muscle problems of myofascial pain and continue to do as much as I can. This is despite the pain it causes but as I near the grand old age of 80 I am thinking should I start to accept this deterioration and just enjoy my life as much as I can without the pain. I am one of those people who try to be independent and do everything myself but some things are really beyond me.

Currently I am in the process of moving house to somewhere where help will be available at the pull of a cord. This will give me peace of mind as recently I seem to have a tendency to fall over! However, in the current situation I am having to do all the packing myself and I have hundreds of books and files. Writing and researching family and local history as well as doing various kinds of arts and crafts means you have a lot of things to move. But they tell the story of my life and are important to me so I have to accept that I must do this packing and get on with it.

At this time of the pandemic we are all having to accept restrictions which curtail our daily lives. This is extremely hard for some and less so for others but it takes a mental toll as well as a physical toll and the consequences will be for everyone to accept and deal with including those at the top. But there are many things in life that we should not accept, like abuse of any kind and neglect of our planet. We must fight to save those who are neglected and especially care for our planet.

Strength and power

I have been reading some of my old blog posts this week and wondering if what I had written still resonated with me and my world. I found one post that did but I need to say that I sometimes feel we are losing our right to speak out about our world and I sometimes feel I am in an experiment designed by someone wanting great power. So here is an edited version of what I wrote several years ago.

‘As the world that we have known crumbles around us, let us stay strong and focus on peace. It will come one day at some point, maybe not in my lifetime but in that of my children and grandchildren.’ These are the words I wrote recently. As we look around us we can see everything that we have known and felt to be safe is now crumbling down around us.
I am older than many and remember the hardships following a war. Since that time, we have changed in many ways, not just ourselves but our country and our world. Some things have got much better but others have got much worse and there are large gaps between different populations.

Many years ago I felt that we were approaching a fairer world but that was not to be. There are so many people around who are greedy for money and for power. But they don’t understand what power really is. They think it is about controlling others and that is not the case. Politicians say things they don’t mean and make promises that they have no intention of keeping. But those words and promises lead people to think that they are good which give the politician a feeling of power.

What does power mean to you? If you look up the word in a dictionary you will see that there are many different meanings but the most ‘popular’ one is about being able to do something
in a proper manner and having the ability to do something. For me maybe it means the ability to do something, to help others, the ability to search for truth, To offer thoughts of peace and healing to others is also what I see as part of my ‘power’. We often hear the words ‘people power’. What do these words mean to you? To me they mean people getting together to do something which can change the way we live in our world. But we are not ‘allowed’ to do that at the moment. I feel that there is more to our pandemic than is seen on the surface. Time will tell of course.