Accomplishment
Accomplishment
19 June 2005
Philadelphia, PA
This morning I woke up with the word “accomplishment”. Well, maybe I didn’t wake up with the word. While still half asleep, I was listening to the radio and a woman was being interviewed about her new book. The writer, Julie Mars, (funny how I remember her name) wrote a book called A Month of Sundays about how she came to terms with her sister’s death. She went to thirty-one different churches and synagogues and other faith settings and rituals to try to figure out why her sister had to suffer so much.
I have no idea why I just added so much detail. I guess it has to do with creating some markers, so that when and if I reread this I will remember something of it. Just like how right now I need to mention the sound of the birds chirping and how that is the only sound I hear right now except for the scratchy sounds of my pen and the occasional distant sound of a passing car.
So, I must have heard the word “accomplish” while listening to the radio. Anyway, it came into the realm of forethought. I guess that must mean something.
My books tell me that “accomplish” came into use around 1380. It seems a lot of these words came in around this time. Must have something to do with the French/Norman influences in England around then. Does a change in language always come with bloodshed? I think not always, but so often it has.
Accomplish started out as accomplisshen. The French stem accomplishir means to fulfill. The Latin root comes from complere, meaning "to fill up". An accomplishment, then, it is a kind of full bag, or a full something, anyway. And maybe that was the context in which I first heard the word this morning. The author was talking about how, when her sister was dying, her sense of time shifted, as well as concerns about all she had done in her life – all of her accomplishments.
Again, I come to the same teaching from the words. It is always the same; it is always a cycle. It is always about paying attention and being present to that cycle, to the wheel. The only way off the wheel is to become present to it.
Each breath I/we take is an accomplishment. It is a cycle of emptying out and filling up again. Sometimes when I am caught up in the doubts and questions and second-guessing about accomplishments and failures – now there’s an interesting polarity! – it is as if I am trying to breathe in and breathe out at the same time.
I just tried to find an antonym for accomplish besides failure, but there doesn't seem to be one. The closest I came was loss. At first that seemed insufficient, but as I thought about it more, as I sat with it, the word “loss” felt better as a polar opposite. But the question remains for me: What is lost when I do not accomplish? And what is lost when I do accomplish something? And what is gained?
Maybe the teaching here is about both the necessity and the illusion of gain and loss. As necessary and illusory as the cycles of my breath. Each cycle contains the promise of the next breath. Each one is complete, fulfilled. With each breath I accomplish. Yet, the promise is also illusory because one day, one time, one breath, the promise will be broken – just like the writer’s sister’s last breath.
Now it feels right to look at that other polarity to accomplishment - failure. What does it mean to fail? Is it just about “not accomplishing” something? Is it related to my old friend enough? Again deep in its origins, this word holds many teachings. It came to us from Middle English (failen), by way of the Old French (failler) and originally from Latin (fallere). This Latin word holds the nuggets. Fallere means “to deceive, to disappoint”.
The opposite of an accomplishment, then, is a deception, a self-deception perhaps. And at the core of a deception there also is a disappointment. An accomplishment is a kind of honoring an appointment with myself, a kind of showing up. Not surprisingly, another word for “appointment” is an engagement, and to engage is to honor a pledge. Accomplishment then is a lovely necklace whose beads comprise elements like: being present, honoring a pledge, acknowledging loss, and risking failure.
As is so often the case, when I get to the end of the last page I am faced with the enormous mystery of the human condition. At the end, at the very end at least, the accomplishment is to do nothing, and in so doing (or not doing) to be accomplished.