acceptance

"If there is a key to my progression, I think it is in the fact that I never accepted any sort of constraint but immediately moved out beyond it. For me 'can't' simply isn't acceptable, and I urge my students to get it out of their vocabulary. I want them to kick against any boundaries that are set up and to figure out how they can shift resources to move beyond them. It takes imagination and hard work because, as far as I'm concerned, there have been no good solutions to problems that haven't demanded a lot of hard work." Shirley Brice Heath, linguistic anthropologist, quoted from Uncommon Genius by Denise Shekerjian.


This woman grew up without access to most of the things that enrich our lives. This she found to be unacceptable.

A lot of us our poorer simply because we were not poor to begin with. We found what we were given, from cradle to grave, an acceptable life. We had things all of our live, never really went without, never really hungry, never too much apprehension about the course our life might take.

If everything were acceptable, why would you try to change it?