The following post was written last spring, before this blog was up and running. It seems particularly appropriate today. Last night, a family member was admitted to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Life continues to teach me about tough love and grace.

I have a daily yoga routine that ends with a short meditation. In the meditation, I ask for five things to be part of my life: clarity, connection to others, creativity, grace, and abundance. In that order. I usually pause when silently arriving at the word “grace” as it seems to always be appropriate for whatever is happening in my life. Lately, grace seems to be more and more pertinent. I think of grace as the ability to fully accept things just as they are, without having a desire to change, fix, or deny.

I talked with a friend of mine recently. She was recounting an Easter visit to see her elderly mother and older brother, who live together. Her mother, widowed twice, has a house with room for long-term visitors. Her mobility is limited as is her eyesight. Her brother, in his sixties, has lived with mental illness most of his life and only recently decided to have contact with family after being on his own for forty plus years. He functions well enough to buy groceries and run other errands but not well enough to keep a job to support himself.

The mother and son have had trouble getting along since the son declared that he did not want to eat meals together. The mother found this offensive. Both sides have
their quirks. Another son suggested to my friend that they have a family intervention while she was in town, to make the mother and son “be nice to each other.” My friend’s reply: “Can’t we just color eggs?” And then she said something that struck a chord.

“You’ve got two people living together who are a little off-kilter, one who has been away for over forty years. How do you make that right?”

She went on to say that there was no abuse involved in the relationship and that both her mother and brother benefited from the arrangement.

Grace has us stop “making things right.” When we stop trying to make things right, we can let go and fully accept what is, grabbing on to only that which is real. How often have I tried to make things right, when things are neither right nor wrong? Mental illness has come up in my own family recently. You can go crazy trying to figure out why someone else is crazy. While others have tried to “figure it out,” I finally decided that there is no right or wrong or simple answer to find comfort in. It just is. Period.

When I can have grace everyday, it’s a lot easier to be in the world, even while others are being drawn into the drama of fixing and controlling that which cannot be fixed or controlled. In the midst of the drama, I can appreciate the forsythia bushes in bloom. I can see the irony of a situation. I can laugh at a magazine ad of a boy practicing a saxophone because it reminds me of my husband when he had hair. For that matter, I can laugh at myself and be at peace. That’s grace at its best.