Courage and Acceptance: 2 Poems for 2022

short potent poetry when new year resolutions just don't cut it

Do you notice how the virtual world is abuzz with ‘New Year New Me’ content every January? Why Habits are Better than Goals, How Intentions are Better than Both, and Here are 22 ways to REINVENT Yourself in 2022. The best of us go clickkityclick.

But honeys, could we please spread this cheesy encouragement across the entire year?

The hopeful part of us gets attracted to new year resolutions. As soon as we announce them, our inner critic clears her throat. She wants to protect us from disappointment. As soon as we plan on exercising or committing to a creative project, she chimes in, “Ha! really? Hello Ma’am, PFA the list of times you failed to stick to your plans!”

The inner critics in those around us also secretly wait for us to fail, restoring the status quo - the state where nobody grows. We ignore all these voices for a few days before they overpower us. We give up. What new year? What resolution? Only guilt carries forward.

But here’s the thing, I love the intention behind setting intentions. There are two errors in this annual drama:

• Time works differently than we would like it to. We cannot change decades of conditioning in the crammed fold between December and January. We need to give ourselves more time to arrive at a fierce desire of who we want to be, and what pursuits deserve our time.

• We need to find things that speak to all parts of us, conscious and subconscious. Wordy promises fail. Checklists gather dust. We need musical reminders and colourful visuals to enthuse our spirit. Art percolates where announcements cannot. While watching a painting or a film, even our inner critic goes speechless for a while.

I know I want to pursue courage this year. And for me, poems can do the trick.

In 2020, I found the poem Everything is Waiting for you by David Whyte, and in 2021, it guided me subconsciously. I moved to Bangalore, where indeed everything was waiting for me. I started living alone for the first time. Whyte taught me what to learn from the soap dish and the kettle, and how to put down the weight of my aloneness.

Last year, two new poems came into my life, and……they bored me. I had no clue that in between episodes of anxiety, I will keep bumping into them, that one day I will ask them to be my guardians throughout 2022.

1. Courage by Naomi Shihab Nye

Photo courtesy: Michael Nye via The Wittliff

I was already a Naomi Shihab Nye fangirl before I arrived at Courage. Her poem Famous saved me from the race to do something spectacular to feel worthy. Through her poems, Kindness, Red Brocade, The Traveling Onion, this warm, Palestinian American poet took me around the world. Her writing advice - Write in nuggets, Always Bring a Pencil, Three lines a day, You’re never too old to start carrying a notebook - pushed me gently.

Her lines ‘Poems hide…What we have to do/is live in a way that lets us find them’ - inspired to teach children to live in this poem-finding way, but in all honesty, I wasn’t always living that way myself.

Courage was the ultimate push to the anxious writer in me. This short and simple poem does not wow you instantly. It just sits there and waits for you to return. When I read it again, I gasped at the last three lines:

What’s there to fear?
Everything. 
A word is brave. 

It felt like a little slap on a behosh writer’s face, asking her to wake up from a trance of fear. Indeed, our words might be braver than us. In fact, she pins the whole poem down to just ‘a word’. Not sentences, not paragraphs, not a chapbook or a film script. A word is the starting point of most creation. By uttering a word or scribbling it, we tell our fear-clogged brain, 'Hey buddy, I wanna be brave.’ And then we gain momentum. We don’t stop there, we see this first word through the journey that Nye describes, into someone’s ears and eyes and hearts.

In 2022, I will go back to Courage and check in with myself - Am I choosing fear or courage? And what can I learn from the bravery of words?

2. Prayer by Galway Kinnell

Photo: Bobby Bristol via LA Times

I have to admit I don’t read dead poets whose names I cannot pronounce. It’s Gawlway Kanawl?? Only when the poet’s lines - ‘sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness’ and ‘wait, for now’ - comforted me, I warmed up to him. He wrote long poems, like the one on 9/11, and a book-length one on the Vietnam war. I was surprised when I saw Prayer, a super short poem.

Well, a poem titled prayer best be short. Better, if the prayer is godless. When I first read it in April 2021, I didn’t understand it. I was bored by it! It felt like an old man’s scattered mumbling.

I read it again in June while scouting poems for a curriculum. Boy, this poem would be a challenge in an English class. The first two lines are palindromes. In the first line, ‘Whatever’ repeats again. ‘Whatever’ reeks of teenage irreverence but insists on being open to whichever situation or struggle is present for you right now. Sure, we can discuss that in class.

But how am I going to explain the second line? Students have never seen a sentence with three is-es! And the last line makes me angry. It is one thing to be okay-ish with whatever awful things are happening. But I don’t want to WANT them to happen. Hell no! The whole enterprise of anxiety is to prevent a million bad things from happening, and a thousand good ones too, believe me.

In September, I was in a real dark place. I was so scared and lonely. I heard the same poem in a podcast, and the poem hit me hard. Maybe because prayers are an oral tradition? I heard it for the vow for acceptance it is. It made sense! A poem about acceptance can do with three is-es. As someone perennially immersed in ‘what should be,’ ‘what could’ve been’, ‘why this?,’ a plain ‘what is’ is what I wanted.

I read Prayer out loud again and again. Since I resist, confuse, storify, and question reality 365x24x7, the occasional suspension of disbelief felt powerful. The emotions, situations, and facts present in my life softened with the poem’s equanimity. Decisions felt easier. Even the worst situations have helped me grow. Then why should I fear them? The poem opened me to my life and left enough room for me to respond to it in creative ways.

In 2022, I will use Prayer to check in with myself - What is my ‘what is’ right now? What facts and emotions am I be called to accept?

What piece of art can accompany you through the unknowns of 2022? Lemme know.

---

Evolving & Enough completed 2 years this week! Thanks is a weak word for the warmth I feel towards everyone who makes time to read it. <3