Last summer in California I met a man who had been a skydiver until, on his nineteenth jump, his parachute failed to open fully and his emergency chute wrapped itself around the partially collapsed main chute. He slammed into a dry lake bed at sixty miles an hour. Doctors thought this broken remnant of a man would never leave his hospital bed. They told him so, and he sank into black despair.
But in the hospital he had frequent visits from another patient, a man whose spinal cord had been severed in an automobile accident. This man would never walk, would never, in fact, move a finger again. But he was always cheerful. "I certainly don't recommend my situation to anyone," he would say. "And yet I can read, I can listen to music, I can talk to people . . . "
And yet: those two words shift the focus from what has been lost to what remains－and to what may still be gained. They gave such hope and determination to the skydiver that he came through his ordeal and today walks without a limp.
Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there's all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action; acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens. Dwight Eisenhower's mother was a deeply religious woman. When the future president was a boy, she would say to him, "Life deals the cards; the way you play them is up to you. There's acceptance in that philosophy － but no hint of apathy.To me the "and yet" part is what inspires me. No matter how bad things may be, we can all say "and yet". And it may be that our "and yet" in spite of our circumstances may help someone who is struggling with similar problems.
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