For most of my life, I have attempted to follow the advice of
the Serenity Prayer to accept the things I cannot change and
to change the things that I can, while pretending that I
can tell one from the other. As life goes on, I am finding that
there are fewer and fewer things I am able to change, other
than myself. So I now spend most of my time examining myself to
determine what I should change and what I should accept. I have
learned that anger and revenge get me nowhere and that when
someone does something displeasing, it makes no difference what
the facts are. It is best to move forward without assigning blame or
rethinking what could have been done to avoid the situation. As there
is no sense in working to “put the cork back in the bottle” once all the
liquid is gone.
The wisdom I once relied upon to help me know what I could
change and what I had to accept seems to have shifted from a
position of me being the master of my own destiny to being a
believer in fate and predestination in many areas. I credit much
of this to laziness, since many times I perceive that the results that I
could achieve would probably not be worth the effort. Fortunately, I
am now much more willing to take responsibility for changing
myself. I have come to realize that as much as I may complain
about how hard it is to eat healthy, it isn’t that difficult if I really want
to do it. Therefore, I am evaluating which of my many habits, choices
or whatever you choose to call them, needs to be altered or eliminated.
This is not an easy task, as I find that anything I honestly want to do, I
can. Exercise, as distasteful as it is for me, is my choice, even though all
I can think about when I hear the word exercise is “extra fries.”
In the past, serenity has meant accepting that which I cannot change
and trying to change that which I can control by being wise enough to be
able to discern one from the other. However, since I am currently more
disposed to believing that the only thing I have power over is myself,
that’s the thing I’m trying to change. I should have figured that out a long
time ago, but it takes awhile for me to get things right, especially since
I always thought I knew what was right from the beginning. Are you
still thinking you can change things that can’t be changed? I am not.
I’m not myself today and everybody has noticed the improvement 75