Most of us limit our acceptance of other people and things. For example, I made a friend who scandalized me saying if someone wanted to build a power plant across the Rowley River at the end of Railroad Avenue, that was fine with him. But not with me.
Acceptance is fundamental to everything: people, places, tasks, everything.
Don’t take it for granted because acceptance doesn’t come naturally. Every person is different from every other person. Every place is different from every other place. You can’t go into the same diner twice because life in a diner changes all the time. Laying down to go to sleep is different each day.
These are exceptionally trying times for all of us. President Trump has made it so. Things we have taken granted may soon no longer exist, such as voting in fairly apportioned elections.
My father fought in the Battle of the Somme in the Great War (World War I). He didn’t choose to be there. Dad loved horses, and because he couldn’t afford one, he joined the New York National Guard to be assigned a horse and a groom. They were just getting acquainted when President Wilson sent his regiment to Brownsville, Texas, to protect the Mexican border from invading groups.
That didn’t last long because the publishing of the infamous Zimmermann Telegram led to our immediate intervention into the European war. Dad was separated from his horse and put on a train to Spartanburg, South Carolina for machine gun training.
There he was put in charge of a Black quartermaster corps then shipped out to France for training in an abandoned monastery at Châtillon-sur-Seine with officers from other countries of the Allied Forces. Finally, he was sent into trenches to be a forward observer and other duties.
Dad was posted with doughboys he knew from his church in Brooklyn, New York. He was assigned to a trench shelter to write reports of the battles and letters to soldiers’ families when their sons were wounded or killed. Dad was thirty-two, a family lawyer who spoke German fluently. He was also used to interrogate German prisoners.
At our supper table dad spoke of the terrifying German barrages. I’ve read all of the 100 letters he wrote to his parents during the war. Dad accepted it all. How could I not accept everything that comes my way?
One kind of acceptance stands out for me. I have friends who know me much better than I know myself. What tells me so? They are people who know exactly what question to ask me when we get in touch. I have known them for their skills and accomplishments, but before I can make small talk, they would pose a question I needed to answer. Uncannily, they knew to ask me an important question I couldn’t avoid. When I replied, I felt I could inch ahead to what I needed to do.
Some of us are so occupied with the chores in our lives, we cannot stop long enough to do what we are best suited to do, the things that would release our energy and give me and others pleasure and help with their lives, too.
Several times in past years, I have attended meetings of The Religious Society of Friends, known as Quakers. Each time I was struck by their individual confessions of neglect of someone they really cared about, in other words, their sins.
As they were unburdening themselves, I wondered what each could have done? Could they have asked a question based on how they accepted that other person?
Bob Brodsky writes from Rowley.