unlearning grace

Grace has multiple definitions. First, “smoothness and elegance of movement”. Second, “courteous good will”. Or, in social settings, “an attractively polite manner of behaving.” It’s an important concept for Christians, meaning “the free and unmerited favour of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.”*

I don’t quite understand what the latter means, and I’m okay with not knowing. It means something for those to whom it means something, and I have no intention of disputing that meaning for them. The second and third definitions annoy me, reminding me of admonitions for women to rest in silent agreement, to be nice girls. It’s the first definition that interests me.

The last eighteen months of my life have called, repeatedly, for grace.

When I was a dancer, grace was a large part of my life. Then, grace was about making your extreme physical exertion appear as if a feather was moving lightly through air. Making your effort look effortless. Your pain invisible. Part of me wishes I had never learned that form of grace, that supposed gracefulness. Part of me is grateful for what I’ve gained in the process of unlearning it.

In different seasons of the last eighteen months of my life, I have expressed anxiety to some of those closest to me, unsure that I was living the composition of my life gracefully.

I wondered if I was grieving my mother gracefully. I questioned if, when circumstances demanded, I was letting go gracefully. I fretted, as change swirled around me, that I was not gracefully steady.  I stressed over the extent to which I was coping with stress gracefully. And when chronic, constant, physical pain set in to my life nine months ago, I grew agitated, worrying I was not existing with my less-wellness gracefully. When that pain forced my path to shift course, tumult arose over my ability to weather the diversion gracefully. Yet to be diagnosed, I have repeatedly doubted how gracefully I am walking through this uncertainty.

My mother lived gracefully. I was anxious to live like her.

But I wonder how much of that anxiety was rooted in that dancer’s definition of grace. That hiding of pain. That spinning of reality into apparent ease. Along with joy, profound gratitude, challenge, and curiosity, the last eighteen months of my life have also held pain, in various forms. In the last eighteen months, I have put a lot of energy into making life appear effortless or, rather, I have put a lot of energy into worrying that I wasn’t.

But the conversation I consider the epitome of my mother’s grace had nothing to do with hiding. It was Easter. Before the extended family came over for the Greek feast that my sister and I had cooked at her request. We sat outside on the porch, under the canopy of trees that surrounded the house she’d moved into because she wanted to feel surrounded by the earth that healed her. “Trees fall down in the forest and die, and somehow new life always emerges. So I am not afraid,” she said, as, gracefully, openly, without veils, she told her children she would soon die.

That first definition sees grace involving elegance, and the definition of elegance includes simplicity. My mother’s grace was simple, not for its lack of depth or complexity or difficulty, but for its clarity, its tenderness, its simultaneous lack of hiding and lack of displaying.

Recently, my physical therapist grew frustrated with me, urging me to not “just grin and bear it.” That’s the dancer in me. In the last nine months of doctors, tests, and failed diagnoses, that dancer’s anxiety has arisen when I have felt I was too focused on pain, when I ‘let’ less-wellness impact my previous normal, when my effort was made too visible. Under that understanding, I was lacking grace.

I’ve learned some things from my dancer training. Dance teaches you to show up, to persist, even when your toes are bleeding and half your body is held together with athletic tape.  You show up and, despite it all, you move softly, and intently, but always with suppleness. Your legs are powerfully strong, but never rigid.

In the last eighteen months, I have employed that dancer’s resilience.

But where my dancer’s training led me astray is in the end result, the polishing. Dancers show up. They persist. They carry on, even with pain. But they are taught to do so to achieve perfection, no matter what, for the sake of the whole. This is not a whole that will carry you when you get off pace, when you misstep, when you fall off pointe. This is a whole that will collectively become imperfect the moment that you do. The moment’s flawlessness depends upon your flawlessness. No matter how badly you are hurt, if your face betrays an ounce of pain, the end result is unsuccessful.

In recent years, as I’ve practiced yoga more and more regularly, intently, and carefully, I’ve seen my learned resilience at work. But until the last nine months, I practiced like a dancer. When given the option to modify to my ability or to overexert myself to exhibit a pose in its fullest form, I never questioned pushing my body past its healthy limit, always persisting through the pain raging through my muscles without ever really considering it.

When my physical therapist admonished me for not telling her I was in pain, my first thought was “I didn’t realize I was supposed to, I didn’t realize there was another option.” I thought that that was living gracefully, to power through life without letting pain interrupt perfection.

But living with constant, unresolved, physical pain is beginning to teach me things of living a fuller grace, my mother’s grace.  As I’ve bounced from health system to health system, doctor to doctor, hypothesis to hypothesis, treatment to treatment, losing more and more mobility and seeing the length of my less-wellness extend well into the next year of my life, I’m challenged to find freedom and joy in new ways, to unlearn and relearn avenues to graceful living, to simply show up in the world, just as I am, with fierce softness, to see, deeply, that not telling my physical therapist when it hurts only inhibits me.

Once, when on a family trip to California just before our mother died, we went on a hike that proved more strenuous than her wellness could peacefully withstand. I remember us growing agitated, wanting to carry on to see the grand view at the end but not wanting to leave her behind, worrying she would be saddened by us doing what she could not. But she insisted we go, finding a sunny place on the path where she planned to read her book while we went. When we returned, she was there with a smile on her face, eager to tell us about the birds she’d witnessed from where she waited. She wanted to see our photos and hear our stories, telling us that witnessing our happiness upon returning was as good, if not better, than having seen the sight herself.

Now, when I go to yoga, I am forced to modify, knowing that if I don’t fiercely listen to how my body is showing up in that moment, it won’t be able to show up the next moment. When I walk outside my comfort by telling the instructor that I am less-well, must adjust my practice so as to best serve my body, I open myself to a new, simple wholeness. The class carries on, I keep showing up, but as my self just as I am, seeing the birds from this new perspective, and celebrating the joy that others are able to live into through their wellness. I lean in to being part of a whole that carries each other, whose success is dependent only on each of us having the courage to exist on our mat as we are, and to breathe.

My plans were forced to change course, the ground shifted beneath me, I’m looking at life off of the adventurous trek for a little while, and I’m learning that grace looks like showing up, but with pain as part of you, finding the sunny patch to rest. It doesn’t mean making your pain the whole of your story, but honoring that it is a piece and finding what new freedoms exist in that. It means coming to your yoga mat, but honoring the places that don’t serve you, saying ‘this is where I am today,’ and opening yourself to see beauty from that looking place.

It’s being willing to be dazzled, not by masking winces as you push yourself to the peak of the mountain no matter what, but by looking out from where you stand, and celebrating the views that each of the whole is able to uncover from where they are.

*Oxford Dictionary