The Gentle Rebels: Balancing Acceptance and Rage as We Age

At a committee meeting with several women, we started discussing how our lives as seniors have changed. One woman, a former nurse, had broken her femur over a year ago. She originally thought that after intensive therapy, she’d be back to her old self. She is nowhere near that. Yet, she chuckled and said, “I’ve adapted. You can’t keep wishing you were your old self. You have to learn to be happy with what you’ve got.” And she is. Always cheerful. Always greeting people with a smile.

Later in the meeting, another woman shared that her spouse had started having tremors. Doctors still haven’t determined the cause. “It’s so frustrating for him," she told us. "He never knows when it’s going to happen. Occasionally, it disables him enough that he can’t even go to the bathroom. He doesn’t want to go out for fear it will happen while he’s in public.”

The nurse responded warmly, “You know what? I don’t drive to the grocery store anymore, so I take the community bus. You’d be surprised at the number of people whose bags are filled with Depends. At our age, our bodies start to betray us. It’s normal.”

We continued to discuss what it means to live with those betrayals—adapting where we can to maintain a worthwhile life, and learning to accept our new conditions.

The Conflict of Acceptance vs. Fight

My nurse friend seems to embody the spirit of the book Until I Say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy. Its author, Susan Spencer-Wendel, was a forty-year-old woman afflicted with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) who wrote: “That is the secret I learn more of every day. Not to want things I cannot have or cannot do. Remove the want, and you remove the pain.” Spencer-Wendel practiced Taoism, which teaches that hardships and pain are natural, unavoidable parts of the universe's ever-changing flow. Rather than resisting emotional or physical pain, Taoism suggests that true peace comes from flexibility and aligning ourselves with the natural rhythm of life.

But as someone who has always resonated with Dylan Thomas’s famous poem, I found myself hitting a wall: “Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

On the surface, raging against the dying of the light doesn’t sound like acceptance at all. So, how can we reconcile Taoist acceptance while still raging against the dying of the light?

The Serenity Prayer as a Bridge

I think the Serenity Prayer helps answer that question perfectly:

• "Accept the things I cannot change" – That is pure Taoism and Buddhism.

• "Change the things I can" – That is where Dylan Thomas’s battle cry comes into play.

Look back at the examples. My nurse friend is doing everything she can to keep what mobility she has. While accepting that her body is no longer what it used to be, she is still raging in her own way. She adapted by taking the bus instead of driving, but she still walks as much as she can, progressing from a walker to a cane, and sometimes walking completely unassisted.

In contrast, another friend of mine simply gave up. She struggled with a walker and a mobility scooter, retreated inward, and passed away two years later of no apparent medical cause. Her friends felt she had literally given up on living.

We can also see this balance in the story of the husband with the tremors. In response to his struggle, the nurse spoke of another friend with essential tremors. That friend worked with a neurologist who targeted a tiny area in the left side of her brain, which successfully eliminated the tremors in her right arm. That was her rage. But she was so happy to have the use of that one arm back, she decided to leave it at that rather than having the doctor operate on the other side. That was her acceptance.

We see it best in Susan Spencer-Wendel herself. She explicitly stated, "I can't fight what is happening to me. There is no cure for ALS." That is a profound Taoist acceptance of reality. Yet, she typed her entire memoir on her iPhone using only her right thumb—the very last moving digit on her body. That is the absolute epitome of "do not go gentle."

The nurse, who is losing her sight, just installed an accessibility app that reads her Kindle books aloud to her. She accepted the loss of her vision, but raged to keep her love of reading.

The Real Struggle: The Wisdom to Know the Difference

Now, I can see how these life philosophies fit together conceptually. But here’s the tricky part, the real daily struggle: the last part of the Serenity Prayer is the Wisdom to know the difference.

At what point do I switch from rage to acceptance? At what point do I realize the physical therapy has taken me as far as it can? At what point do I give up on my counted cross-stitch hobby because no magnifying device makes it easy to see? At what point do I give up cooking fancy dishes because I can no longer stand for four hours as they do on the Great British Baking Show?

Maybe wisdom isn’t a fixed destination, but a pivot. When we can no longer rage against the limitation itself, we can redirect that rage into finding a new way to express our passions.

We all struggle with these types of questions. So, is this where the philosophies collide? Or do I just need to hone up on my Wisdom? Unfortunately, you can't just Google the answer to that one.

In fact, right as I was drafting this very section—at the exact moment I was preparing to emotionally accept that my cross-stitch days were over—total irony struck. I walked into my husband's hobby room. There he was, working on a model train, wearing a lighted headpiece with a slide-down magnifying glass called an OptiVisor.

A literal miracle on a headband.

Just as I was pivoting toward acceptance, a new avenue for rage appeared. It reminded me that wisdom isn’t a permanent, static choice. Sometimes wisdom means accepting a limitation today, but keeping your eyes open for the tool that lets you fight back tomorrow.

YOCTOSUN LED Headband Magnifier

When we can no longer rage against the limitation itself, we redirect that energy—whether that means finding a stool for the kitchen, downloading an audio app for failing sight, or stealing our husband's model train gear to finish a cross-stitch pattern.

Finding the Balance

So, I will continue to practice accepting the things I cannot change, while fiercely loving and changing the things I can.

But let's be honest: while my spirit strives for the sublime detachment of the Tao, my stomach still operates in the real world. I might be learning to flow like water, but since we moved to Florida, I still dream of a good old Chicago gyro sandwich, dripping with tzatziki sauce. Can't I indulge in those fantasies every once in a while? After all, true acceptance means accepting our cravings, too—especially the ones wrapped in warm pita bread.