Looking for grace. I think that really is what we’re all doing, whether we’re willing to acknowledge it or not. We’re all looking for grace. Grace in the sense of ease, fluidity and elegance. And grace in the sense of the unearned favour and kindness, a free gift, a blessing, or help that we cannot earn or repay. The problem we have in finding it, is that somewhere along the line someone added the word ‘undeserved’ to the definition: that suggests that we do not deserve anything unless we earn it first.
I disagree.
I believe that not only do we all deserve grace, we all receive it if only we are open to doing so.
Pause a moment. Before you run off in fear of some religious lecturing, I will just add that grace has nothing to do with faith in whatever gods or belief-system you choose or reject. Grace is such an ordinary miracle: we are all surrounded by it, all the time.
We can choose to live with the sense of ease, fluidity and elegance. We can stop punishing our bodies in the incessant small ways that we do. I’m not talking about how we eat, what we drink, not even so much about how we move – I think those things are effects as much as cause.
I’m talking more about the way we hold our body as we go through the everyday ways of the world. Most of us, I feel, refuse to allow our bodies to take up the space they are designed for. We try to make them smaller. Again, I’m not talking diet or exercise, I’m talking how we hold ourselves. Now. As we are in this moment – whether we want to change that shape or not. We women especially have a tendency, not of our own choosing, to make ourselves small – emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and especially bodily we subconsciously try to take up less space. I know I have done so for a long time.
One of my self-deprecating comments has long been: with my usual degree of elegance, i.e. none whatsoever. True in its way, but equally a harmful story I have been telling myself. I have spent decades unknowingly trying to be smaller, less tall, less visible, closing myself down, with all the stooping and cramping in and covering up that entails. I’m never going to master elegance if I keep doing that.
So, belatedly, but maybe with divine timing: I decide it is time to stop. Time to take up my space. To stand tall. Head up, shoulders back, looking one Chinese mile ahead and not at the floor at my feet. Letting my body move the way it has been designed to do. Imperfectly for sure. I’m never going be Grace Kelly, but then that job has already been taken. I can be more me.
We can also choose to live in the knowledge of that other sense of grace. Claim it too. We can stop batting back every single compliment that comes our way. We can learn to accept them graciously, knowing that it has nothing to do with whether we deserve them or not. If someone loves our outfit, why does it matter that it was cheap or is pre-loved or twenty years old? Presumably we also love it or we wouldn’t have chosen it. At least, I hope that is so. If we don’t love the clothes in our wardrobe, they have no right taking up space. We need to ditch them and find the ones we do.
But this isn’t really about clothes, it’s about our response to compliments. This isn’t just a woman thing, but I suspect it is more a woman thing. I suspect most men (not all) accept every good comment as their rightful due. Perhaps that’s because they think they’ve earned it, and we have a tendency to be sure we haven’t.
This isn’t a modern disease. It goes back generations. They used to call it warding off the evil eye. Then it became the mortal sin of pride. The result is that we are, as Barbara Kingsolver puts it, “afraid to claim anything we love for fear it will be taken away.”1
Brenée Brown talks about foreboding joy. It’s the same thing.
It comes back to that sense of being undeserving. We fear that what we love will be taken away because we feel or fear that we didn’t deserve it in the first place.
I genuinely hold that we need to obliterate that. We need to turn away from it. We need to reprogramme our minds, brains, bodies, spirits to the acceptance that we deserve every good thing that comes our way. We don’t have to have earned it. We simply need to see it clearly for the blessing that it is. That maybe the Universe knows better than we do what we do or don’t deserve – and more importantly what it is willing to give us whether we deserve it or not.
At this point I can hear you all squirming about the mega-rich and how that fits into this picture.
Full disclosure: I don’t know.
But I think there is something around figuring out and getting really clear on what counts as a blessing – as opposed to what is simply materiality without associated love, warmth, joy, what is power without humanity. When I look at the very rich and the very powerful and the very famous - which seem to be the current definitions of 'success' - not mine, I might add - then my question is always the same: yes, but are they happy? A lot of the behaviour of many of them (again, not all but, I'd hazard, most) seems to suggest that no, at soul level they are not happy. Perhaps they don't know. Perhaps they've never checked in with their own souls. Which is even more sad.
If you haven't checked in with your soul recently, do so today. It's really easy. Take yourself off by yourself for an hour or so. Sit quietly, or climb a mountain, or swim in a sea, or just walk the streets of your neighbourhood, or lie down in a darkened room. Anything that you can do without having to think about it. Checking in with your soul does not involve thinking. To be fair it does not involve none-thinking either. It needs ease and openness to who you are in the moment. Put the brain in neutral and your soul will step forward and do the rest. Afer a while you will notice where you are happy or where you are sad, where you are fearful or where you are grieving, where you are excited, where you are bored. After a while you feel where you are living in alignment and where you are off-kilter. Your only job in the moment is to notice.
The re-alignment work comes later. Greeting yourself where you are now, how and who you are now, that's an important thing to do. Accepting it, is step two. No judgement. When I do this, I usually recognise myself. Yes, I knew that...ah, but I'm still not doing what needs to be done...or actually, that's ok, it's work-in-progress. And sometimes I don't. Sometimes, I think Shit! Where did that come from? And there may or may not be an answer, but knowing I'm out of kilter in a way I had not spotted is something to be composted or planted. No judgement. Just noticing.
If the word soul does not sit easy with you, think of it simply as your deeper self, your subconscious, the you you would be if you weren't too busy doing what the outer world is demanding of you.
With all of that in mind, I have been deliberately looking for grace this week…and finding it…
I found it at home with an old friend and a cheap pizza, sharing memories and forgotten moments. Laughter. And serious talk. Both. She left me with a card that I opened, and a present bag that needs to wait a week. She left me with the strength of our shared history. Thirty years is a long time.
~
I found it sitting outside a city pub, on an unseasonably warm October evening. I watched a skein fly over the river and the rooftops, black against the evening-bright sky. Geese! I exclaimed. No-one heard, or at least no-one looked up. It mattered to me, though, to have seen them. Returning geese are the returning Winter, the turning of the year. They are a sign of something continuing despite everything we do to reject it or prevent it or spoil it.
Geese against the evening sky, on a warm October evening. That is a moment of grace.
~
A light show in a cathedral. Modern magic that drew us back to an earlier kind, a procession of any kind, is a kind of pilgrimage.
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Leaving a dance class, a woman who used to always stand in front of me on the left-hand side of the studio, but has recently migrated eastwards with us and is now as often alongside or behind as she is in front – she should be in front, she has less height than me, and is also a better dancer – as we were gathering up to leave she twice touched me on the arm, and smiled. She didn’t say anything, but it still felt like a blessing.
Then another woman of equally oriental heritage stopped me, with another warm smile, and said ‘Thank you’. I have literally no idea what for and on this occasion decided not to ask. The appropriate English response is You’re welcome, so I said that. And she was, is, welcome to whatever I had done or said or been. Grace ripples out and back and around. It’s there when we notice.
~
A lunchtime table in a sports centre café. Some bought-food, some smuggled in. Coffee and cakes. And fruit. Conversation randomly moving between the silly and the serious…life-sharing. A cheap cup-cake, a single candle, and the learning of a tradition from another culture as a ring was slipped over it. Prayers and wishes and intentions. This is the love, she said, embracing the circle with her palm-opened arms. That was reason enough to be there. I wasn’t the only one to comment that what you put out is what gets reflected back.
Something else she said, not to me, to someone else as though it were part of a continuing conversation: you see, random people do meet randomly.
There is grace in that too. She was offering comfort, for something I knew nothing about.
To repeat a whisper from the universe I’m sure I must have shared before: I am sending you the people you need, in the order that you need them. We needs must notice the people who are sent to us, and when…then perhaps we may figure out why.
~
Beautiful autumnal sunshine on the three days of the week that I wanted to walk into the city from home. Late afternoon sun, mid-day sun. Golden leaf-fall. Even the ability to walk at all, the willingness, the joyfulness of a mile or two. Catching sight of my own shadow, and smiling.
Elegant? Ah, maybe not quite yet, but working on it. Pulling the shoulders back, looking ahead. Smiling. The gift of time. The gift of movement. The gift of good weather. The signature scent of incoming November: woodsmoke.
Grace.
It is no surprise that grace is so closely related to the Latinate words for thank you. Gracias. Grazie. Gratias. We have carried this over into English for the name of the thank-you prayer before a meal: to say grace…literally to say thank you.
So maybe, when I say we are all looking for grace, what I mean is that we are all looking for things to be grateful for. And, seriously, how hard can that be?
Near midnight on a Saturday night and I’m home alone, writing: what do I have to be thankful for?
I’d start as I always do: four walls and a roof, clean water on tap, I don’t live in a war zone. Friends, that I could list, but won't, and some remaining family. I am safe and free. I choose to believe I am loved, though others might count that uncertain. I can write. I can read. I can walk and swim and dance. There is music. If I seek it out, there is laughter. And learning. There is the technology I am using to put these words on what passes for a page and will allow me to send them out into the world. There are cupboards and cold-stores full of food, and the means to cook it, and the recipes to encourage me to do more than just heat it up. Indeed on the stove, right this minute, is a pan of pork and beans that is more complicated than it sounds. I have a garden and a library which a philosopher once said is all that we need.
There is a party going on over the road. Loud noise that at this time of night I could do without. But they are students, and maybe I will someday need what they are learning. And, really, don’t we want the young to be joyous? There is so much weight on the young that shouldn’t be there, so even when they’re actually irritating me, I can be grateful that there is still space for them to be young – as we were, once upon half-a-century ago.
Strange as it is, many of the things I am thankful for are things I might not have wished for. I love the life I have now, but I only have it because of what and who I lost along the way.
Perhaps grace is another word for acceptance. Acknowledgement. Perspective. Looking at the world a different way. With more contentment...
…but the kind of contentment that says, “Yes, but… yes, I love all this, but you know what? I’m still passionate, I’m still eager to explore, to learn, to grow, to change…I mean, I’m not ungrateful…because I really am GRATEFUL, astonished and surprised that this is all here and so am I… and some days I will sit quietly and just breathe it all in, and look at the sky and the sea…
…but forgive me, there will also be the other days when I need to be up and doing and changing again."
Grace is not a state that you can be in.
Grace is elegance, fluidity, flow. Grace is being blessed and blessing and rippling outwards.
Grace is nothing more than noticing the abundance even as you walk through it and pick from it and reject it and leave it for others to enjoy…mostly it is the noticing of it…and taking only what you need.
Grace is taking up all the space your were designed and destined to take up, because that too is something to be thankful for – that you were designed to be you!
Grace is moving through the world gently but without shrinking or shirking.
I am in training. I am learning, slowly, how to be graceful.
1 In Animal Dreams
