Serenity

The serenity prayer has had some versions, or at least that's what one can find in the web. One of the short version goes like this:

"Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; the courage to change that which can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other"

It's used by the AA and you can find in the web that the official story, they even have a wife confirming some points, is that Reinhold Niebuhr wrote those lines. There is implied somewhere that he might have used something similar already in use. I do find the name Reinhold Niebuhr very strange also. And i can't even start to agree with the morality of war. War can be a nation's design, but can't ever be placed in the morality context. That's personal matters, and also for another day.

I do think this is an interesting set of statements, specially if we read it, stop at last on, and think about it. That last couple of words just say that we need wisdom, or divine intervention, depending on your point of view about those matters, to be able to to use the first two effectively. The problem is that we can't be sure of always making the right choice between patience and courage. And that puts us back into the first part of the sentence, we must accept our limitations with serenity. But we can always, and we must, ambition improvement, one's improvement. And then we are at the second part of the sentence, it's getting a bit circular now. So, now we must know ourselves and that's is the most challenging.

The thing about knowing oneself, or others for that matter, is that people do change. We are not static personalities, we absorb differently life's experiences, and we are getting new ones by the second. I can't imagine anyone saying that is not so. One day someone told me that i should play chess, i am always thinking about the future, analyzing the present and preparing myself for many options. I don't like chess though. I think chess is very narrow minded. We can't have rules imposed in life, and our options can't have such a wide time limit. Computers play chess, and win, because they can calculate all options and find the best to get faster to a win. People play chess the same way. Life can't be like chess. Life is more of a fluid environment, changing all the time, including the set of rules used. It's more like the Heisenberg principle. The act of making an observation is changing the observation results.

If we just make some assumptions on a fact that life brought to us, that changes you. The fact that you have changed have the potential to change the way you looked at the facts first. This is why i don't like chess, it's not a very accurate simulation of war and life. We must really on other type of tools to get through. I do think some of the tools are explained in the books from Antonio Damasio. They are feelings and emotions. The act of being completely rational impede any decision. And that is true, we can't enumerate all possibilities, because as soon as you start they change, and when you end they changed you.

That's why the serenity prayer is interesting, it can make you think about other things that are hidden, about the fact of knowing oneself being an impossible task. That's also why i don't regret anything in my life. I only could regret any if i didn't changed with my experiences. Regretting something would mean that i was stopped and not accepting that one changes, that the decision was right or wrong for eternity. We can't have decisions for eternity, they are only for the moment we take them. They can turn out to be nice of hurt you, but either way they will be with you, change you and the world around.