Serenity - Accepting the things we cannot change
Serenity - Accepting the things we cannot change
“That is what I got to watch at the airports I was in the last few weeks. People absolutely freaking out - experiencing major melodramatic trauma dramas - because their plans were disrupted. People crying and screaming, abusing airline personnel (I asked the woman I dealt with at passenger assistance if she got combat pay.) It wasn’t the people behind the airline counter that were at fault - but that didn’t stop people from abusing them because they did not have a clue about how to accept something that they didn’t have the power to change. Delayed flights are life events. Life events happen. Combing a common phrase in our language with something I say in my book: fertilizer happens. Life events are opportunities for growth - in this case, a very clear reminder to me of what a gift twelve step recovery is in my life and how much progress I have made in my recovery. I was able to accept reality and flow with life instead of fighting reality and creating a lot of artificial stress.” “I reacted - not only to important things like delayed flights or car breakdowns or losing a job, but also to small things in people’s behavior or the way my day was unfolding - as if they were life threatening, as if my whole world was being destroyed. Learning to apply the Serenity Prayer has helped me to stop creating so much artificial stress in my life because I wasn’t accepting reality as it was being presented to me. About 90% of the stress I used to experience in my life was artificially created - was created by my attitudes and expectations.”
This is the second in a series of articles focused on how to apply the Serenity Prayer in our lives by having the wisdom and discernment to recognize the things we do have the power to change.
Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls by Robert Burney is copyright 1995. Material on Joy2MeU web site (except where otherwise noted) is copyright 1996 thru 2015 by Robert Burney PO Box 98 Fallbrook CA 92088.
Serenity - Accepting the things we cannot change was originally published online on the Inner Child/Codependency Recovery page that I used to edit for Suite101.com Directory on July 28, 2002. There is a list of - and links to - other articles recently published on that Directory on my Suite101 Articles page.
Originally published at https://joy2meu.com/Acceptance.htm