Allow me to be vulnerable with you for a minute. Let me quote to you something by the lovely Mary Oliver: ‘you can have the other words – chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.’
Like Mary Oliver, I don’t exactly know what grace is, but I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it might be, and why I want to remember to “take it” more often. I turned 21 last week — the big two one — and over the course of being celebrated by all of the people I love, I got asked a good many times a similar question of, “what do you think you have learned these past 21 years?”
At first, I was blank. Because, to be honest with you, I wasn’t fully sure what I had learnt — or what I had learned that could be worth anything to anyone, let alone myself. I have spent much of my life being a very serious person. I have spent many of my days stressed, upset, annoyed, caught in grief. But I have also spent a wonderfully full amount of time being happy, or more importantly so: being content. And if I had to think on the moments when I was most content in my life, it would be those in which I received what can only possibly be defined as grace.
To take you back to a few weeks ago, I had a moment where I got unbelievably stressed out over things beyond my control. The result of this was an impasse between my friend and myself due to my incapability of calming down. But it was in hers, as well as my flatmates’, approach to my emotions that things finally resolved. She reminded me there was nothing to be properly upset over because the situation could easily be settled, and that she understood my reaction was a buildup of various factors in my life.
She had had a long and stressful day herself, but she made room for my emotions, provided me the leniency of my reaction, and gave me grace. After resolving things with her, I sought further comfort with my flatmates, explaining to them why I had been so stressed. Their solution to my emotions: a dance party. Every ounce of stress and tension that I’d previously felt instantly melted away. My mood switched. They had been busy with their own lives, but they had taken a moment outside of themselves to kindly give me some of their time and grace.
So, to answer the question posed to me multiple times over the course of my birthday, I think it’s important to remember to give grace. Not only to your friends and to yourself, but to the strangers on the street living lives that we are all oblivious to. You’d be surprised how much contentment it breeds, how much it slows down the pace of life when you remember to have it. In my life I am lucky to have a great many things, chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. But, like the lovely Mary Oliver, I want to remember to take whatever grace is, over and above anything else.
Image Helena Lopes on Unsplash