What Can We Control Now?
Serenity: the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled.
Over the last 6 months, I’ve gained a new group of friends that meet weekly. Nearly every time we got together to chat, one person would suggest that we say The Serenity Prayer as a group. An age-old prayer that I had heard countless times since I was a child. For context, just think of how many times you have heard it, then consider that my nana (refuses to be called “grandma”) spent her career cooking for priests for 30 years and raised her family to be devout Catholics. Yeah, I heard it a lot. Although it was a prayer that I could easily recite word-for-word, I didn’t grasp (or practice) its meaning. Here I was with this group of friends listening to it almost weekly — I heard it with fresh ears. For this piece I’ll explore a practical interpretation of the prayer.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”
For the longest 2 months of our lives, we have experienced a rude awakening to our powerlessness. And it’s pretty damn hard to accept. Virtually everything that we enjoyed in life — cancelled. Even things that we didn’t really enjoy, but would rather be doing than being stuck at home — cancelled. Day by day a flood of bad news — jobs lost, lives lost, hope lost. All out of our control. In my case, I’m one of the 30+ million people in the United States that was laid off as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was not on my New Year’s vision board! Like most planners, I had my year laid out. I factored in some risk, the most extreme was something like my department budget not being approved. But global pandemic and being laid off… didn’t quite penetrate my realm of possibilities. Coming to grips with this newfound reality was initially troubling. I had to wrestle with my own belief system of how I viewed strength and weakness. For years I held a belief that strength came from an ability to influence or control my circumstance. I thought that belief gave me an advantage. I’ve come to realize that was a delusion. I can’t control what my employer does, I can’t control what our political leaders do, and I can’t control the world shutting down. I can only control how I respond.
“…the courage to change the things I can…”
In my years playing competitive sports, all the good coaches that I played under had a similar mantra when a player wasn’t performing well — “you can control your attitude, energy, and effort.” This essentially meant that even if my shot wasn’t falling on the basketball court, I could still dive for a loose ball and make an impact on the game. Mentally, I could stay in the game. That was always one of the toughest things to do, but I got a lot of practice doing it (there were plenty of games where my shots weren’t falling). It took a lot of courage and discipline, and most players weren’t willing to adopt the mentality. Now, the stakes are significantly higher than a basketball game — but the principle surely applies. It can feel impossible to have a resilient attitude in the face of our darkest moments. In fact, it’s perfectly okay to sit in that impossible feeling for a little while as we grieve. Those are great moments to reflect, write out how you are feeling, and share with your loved ones what you are going through to help you process. But it’s not okay to stay there. Having the courage to bring yourself up and coach yourself through a rock bottom moment will shift your psyche from a victim mentality of “why is this happening to me?” to “how is this working for me?” and “what can I practice at this moment?” Those questions spark an attitude shift and an awareness of what you can control, which is how you respond. This is deciding to get the certification you’ve been telling yourself to get, or building a framework for commitment to your workout routine, or actively reaching out to your contact network. This mindset helps you stay in the game.
“…and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Understanding how to separate what you can and can’t control requires good judgement, which entails practice and experience. It takes time, and it’s something we can continue to work at. Good thing we have nothing but time right now. Fortunately, we will encounter experiences throughout our lives to repeatedly put our understanding of this to the test. For me, I often like to write down in columns to help me deal with my emotions in how I respond to an event out of my control. This simple exercise can work not only in a pandemic crisis, but in everyday life. It helps us focus more on what we can control, letting go more and more of what we cannot change. This focus guides our next move with our own intentions.
The Serenity Prayer viewed in a practical way provides meaningful insight for our daily lives. Our current crisis has magnified its words by showing us precisely how much we are not in control of the circumstances we are in or what we are forced to experience. But the beauty in any experience out of our control is that we have a choice in how that experience shapes us. Being calm, peaceful, untroubled, courageous, and wise are responses from opportunity in dark moments. It takes experience. It takes practice. When we hear the Serenity Prayer, it’s usually only the first three lines — “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” The three lines that follow, hidden in the nuances of our work, are just as important.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardship as the pathway to peace
