OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Revenge of the Unintentional Guest Post

November 17th, 2009

So you don’t need to be in a twelve step program or even have the number of people in your life that are in such programs that I have in mine to have bumped into Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

I excerpt from an email to a the unreliable narrator yesterday:

I couldn’t remember the stupid first line of the serenity prayer — what is it we ask for in order to help us to accept what we cannot change? And if we’re asking for serenity, for courage and for wisdom, why do we call it the serenity prayer and not the courage prayer or the wisdom prayer? Is one of the three more important than the others? And why do I keep finding myself frustrated, wanting to change everything, and bewildered at it all?

And I steal a little bit of her answer:

So I was thinking last night, It’s called the serenity prayer because anyway for Westerners/North Americans, serenity/acceptance is a lot harder than “courage” (or anyway the desire to change everything within arm’s reach) and “wisdom” (or anyway our belief that we’re right about what we know and should have our way)?

One of the wisdoms of DBT is that you can’t even change anything until you first accept it the way it is. I.e. how can you change your situation until you accept that every time your husband comes home drunk he will hit you? How could Rosa Parks refuse to give up her seat unless she fully accepted what was going on, what it meant, what the consequences were going to be? So I think of it sometimes as, God grant me the serenity to accept the situation exactly the way it is, and the courage to get myself out of the situation when I need to do so for my safety and sanity, even though it is going to cause all KINDS of problems and be terribly inconvenient and oh, I’m not even WORTH making such a big fuss, I should probably just hush and suck it up for a while longer, it’s not that bad….

And how lucky am I that I get to have conversations like this via email? And I keep thinking about this and keep thinking about it, and finally decide that what I love most about her response is that it points for me towards this notion that maybe wisdom and courage and acceptance/serenity aren’t all that distinct from one another. That sometimes it takes courage to squeeze your eyes open a little and un-flinch your shoulders and realize that the situation you’re in hasn’t left you on the floor half dead, which might be a first step towards accepting it. As much as we’d like to think that wisdom sits back in reserve picking out the situations for changing, the situations for accepting, but I have yet to meet native wisdom like that, and it occurs to me that even if God is granting you the wisdom, it generally comes not as a lightning bolt, but from experience, from trying to change some situation that it turns out you can only accept, from trying to accept some situation you really need to change, and oh, but it takes courage to make a mistake, dust yourself off, and turn it into wisdom. Courage is sometimes the willingness to keep trying and maybe be wiser the next time. Or the time after. If you can accept that, what can’t you accept? And then the way acceptance is a part of courage, that willingness to be seen fallible and imperfect, to accept yourself as fallible and imperfect so that you can take a risk.

My sister and I were having a conversation about how differently my various children go about music lessons and practicing, and how my six year old right now doesn’t like making mistakes at all, and doesn’t take risks — if something is challenging and new he does this little retreat, “I’m much too exhausted to do this right now, I had such a long hard day” and this sometimes requires all of my patience to keep coaxing him, to keep emphasizing how much he is doing right. But it’s good for me to see this because I think it’s familiar, that this particular form of risk taking is awfully hard for me too.

(Synchronistically? My friend Patrick just posted this on the idea of artistic risk. Great minds and all, right?)

And I think this underlying idea of risk has been nagging at me a lot lately, that I will fall into doing what I know I can do okay and doing it over and over and over again, and I think it has something to do with my perception of feeling stuck, and even though the things I do with love all involve this element of risk, of laying bits of myself open to the world, whether it’s parenting or music or writing, I’ve wondered how to become more okay with risk. Maybe today it starts with the serenity prayer.

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