Accept What Is

It was my first day at Mariya uMama weThemba monastery in South Africa. I had gone there, as I posted earlier, to “live with people from another country and lend a hand where asked.”

To that point, no one had asked.

My wife was using her library science skills to help catalog the monks’ library. But there seemed to be no task for me. And all those feelings of uselessness came to the surface. “What will happen if I’m not ‘productive’ today? Why can’t they find me something to do? Why is doing so important anyway?”

Perhaps it isn’t.

As it turned out, that was part of the wisdom that the day held for me. It was enough to try to recover from a growing respiratory infection, to do what I could to rest and recuperate, perhaps even to write things whose value I could never comprehend.

It was, in truth, the same old lesson that I had heard a thousand times already. And I must hear it again and again and again, because I clearly haven’t learned it yet. It is such a simple lesson: accept what is.

Accept what is.