To Nothingness Do Sink
Finding freedom in acceptance
Above: Where Keats was standing, obviously, when he wrote his morose words.
As a recovery tool, acceptance enables us to give up trying to control the things we ultimately cannot (virtually everything outside of ourselves). By accepting a situation for what it is, in a factual sense, we free ourselves from a need to convince or manipulate or persuade or anything else we might do in an effort to change some person or situation we have no real control over.
There’s no need approve of the situation or validate it or tolerate bad behaviour. We simply accept the facts of it and, in doing so, we’re often better able to make choices about what to do. Choices we probably weren’t aware emerge from the reality in front of us, which is no longer constrained by what we wanted or were waiting to see. We’ve gotten out of our own way and now we can act.
This is a practice I’m only starting to learn about and trying to implement. A few days ago, I was leafing through a poetry anthology on my bookshelf and saw the title of a sonnet I memorized many years ago. I wanted to check the lines against those in my memory to see if my memorization had held up and as I did, I realized I was seeing the poem in a new light – as a sort of nod to acceptance.
When I was in university in my late teens and early 20s, I felt like I bore the weight of the world on my shoulders. There was an immense amount of pressure on me to succeed, or so I thought. Getting good marks, finding a good job, having a career that meant something, and living up to my potential were not just possibilities, but a collective imperative.
I wanted to make something of myself so I’d never have to depend on my messy, unreliable parents for anything again. I didn’t want to end up like my mother, married to a man who didn’t respect me and with what seemed like little agency in my own life (my mother didn’t find this idea offensive at all; she often told me I shouldn’t get married. Naturally, I didn’t listen).1
Looking back, I can see how my willingness to hold myself responsible for things I ultimately couldn’t fully control was due to too much responsibility being thrust on me at an early age. In any case, I remember stumbling across a John Keats sonnet in one of my classes that imparted a sense of immediate relief. I promptly memorized it so I could have it on hand any time I felt my anxiety rising.
When I Have Fears that I May Cease To Be John Keats When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charact'ry, Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starr'd face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour! That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
I think what drew me to this sonnet was the idea that someone can free themselves from the pressure to accomplish something (fame) or find someone (love). At the time, I desperately wanted to find love but had no idea how to go about it. Whether that love was a person or a purpose, it, too, was a sort of pressure in my Christian environs. Still, it paled next to the demand that I become and remain self-sufficient, always – a tall request for a 17-year-old and I’d already sacrificed my adolescence on the altar of that quest.
I think the sonnet also appealed to the ascetic Christian ethos I’d been raised in that told us to shun the things of this world. Having shunned the one or two role roles available to women in that community (wife/mother, unmarried ‘sister of the church’) to pursue a worldly lifestyle, I often felt as though my feet were in two worlds. One world told me to focus only on spiritual matters, to shun materialism, and to plan for eternity; the other told me to pull myself up by my own bootstraps, to make my own way, and to plan for the next bill. Common sense told me I lived in the world of the latter, but the tension doubtlessly added to my anxiety.
The solution? Nihilism, of course. Let love and fame to nothingness do sink. Doing so extended a brief reprieve from the pressure I often felt was swallowing me up.
Now when I read this poem, I think Keats himself was warding off self-consumption by his own fears (rightly so, perhaps! After all, he died at age 25). So afraid of death, he can’t even name it in the first line and reaches for a euphemism instead. He needn’t have worried about the fame part. Despite the brevity of his own life, his famed words are still remembered. And loved.
But I also see a sort of acceptance: an acceptance that we are all subject to death. There’s that damned inevitability of death, again. The loss of love and fame is thus inevitable too, and it’s only in accepting their loss that the poet can move past his fear of it. Freed from worry, he can focus on living the life he has.
Through acceptance of the possibility or even certainty of some outcome, then, we vanquish our fear of it and re-centre our perspective on our choices in the present. There’s no need to get nihilistic about it either, as though nothing matters at all; we can instead choose to trust that things will work out as they’re meant to. We can choose to believe some power higher than ourselves will ultimately take care of our wellbeing.
My higher power, of course, is just a generic life force. Maybe Keats’ is, too, with his frequent references to nature. Maybe he seeks the ‘nothingness’ of internal peace extending from an awareness that we can find freedom even when our fears come true. Someone once told me fear is simply the false belief that we won’t have the resources we need to meet the present moment. When we realize we can indeed meet it, that we do have the internal resources to accept and embrace it, our fears fall away.
To nothingness we sink.
For more (shorter) posts with poetry, see:
No regrets. My ex-husband is a wonderful man and I’m glad I went for it. But this is sensible advice for anyone under the age of thirty.