355. Accomplishment

Bringing Me Joy: Blogging from A to Z Challenge, April 2016

Accomplishment (pronounced accumplishment) brings me joy. Carrying a task to completion delivers, with the deep breath drawn in the moment of its fulfillment, a quiet confidence that has been fully earned. In the very next breath, new doubts will certainly arise again, and old business that demands attention; let them come in their time, but for now, I must savour this moment, look upon what has been done, and know that it is good.

There is a world of difference between accomplishment in the active sense of accomplishing something and in the passive sense of being accomplished. It is not for nothing that the expensive institutions where young women from wealthy families were sent to be prepared for their entry into fashionable society were called finishing schools: they were polished so as to be polished off, so to speak; with their suitable marriage, it was thought, there would be an end to it, no need for further accomplishments on their part besides hanging like an adornment on the right man’s arm.

More than 200 years ago, Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), displayed a healthy cynicism regarding society’s expectations of the accomplished woman in her time. Here’s the infuriatingly snooty Miss Bingley and the aristocratically aloof Mr. Darcy rehearsing the requirements for membership in that exclusive club, followed by Elizabeth’s cool, clever reply:

     A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, all the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.”
      “All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”
     [Elizabeth:]“I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women.  I rather wonder now at your knowing any.”   [Pride and Prejudice, via Modern Mrs. Darcy]

Being accomplished entails being worked on, staged, as it were, for the marriage market. Setting out to accomplish a task, on the other hand, is an active process that produces positive change. Real accomplishment is a product of hard work, skill, and persistence over a period of time. For me, among all the registers in the range of joy, a sense of accomplishment is one of the most deeply satisfying.

A change is achieved in the day it is done.

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