Acceptance, they say, is where you begin. I may be more stubborn than most, but I find myself moving in and out of acceptance. I find much in the world baldly wrong – poverty, graft, ridiculous wealth, violence – and it’s difficult for me to know how ‘acceptance’ isn’t just a weak way of saying …
Maybe it’s bred into us, this urge to turn spiritual ideas on their heads. When they’re upside down like that, they’re silly and useless. We topple them and feel gratified. Point, snear, and say I knew it. Addicts and alcoholics are champions at this game. We turn the word ‘powerless’ into ‘helpless’ and dismiss it …
Powerlessness, to admit the thing, begs us to revolt. We hear “vulnerable”, we hear “weak”. In a world that prides itself on willpower and individualism, it’s not a fashionable thing. To say nothing of comfort. We probably hate the absoluteness of it, most of all. As in never, completely, in any circumstances, no matter what …
“Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” If we’ve come this far at all, we’ve done something about step one. We’ve admitted we’re beat, we are sick, we’re stuck. There will be other times, in other places in our life story, where we will ‘admit powerlessness’. It usually …
