The last few days, the serenity prayer has been coming up a lot in my day-to-day observations. It started out with me realizing that I've put quite a lot of my time into wondering why people do things the way they do. This keeps bringing me back to the first half of the serenity prayer: "To accept the things I cannot change." It's way harder than I thought it would be, but it seems like something I would like to focus on. Without even realizing it, in quite a lot of the interactions I have, I get the urge to challenge perspectives. It's quite judgmental, really. It's also quite automatic. Most times, it's quite harmless, as it's just a passing thought. But there are times when I get too invested—this happens more than I would like to admit. A few days ago, I did it again. It was around the subject of mastery. I was having a conversation with someone who is a jack of quite a lot of trades, and I just couldn't get it. Me trying to question this and wanting to show my perspective was a total waste of time, really. The world I see, the way I see it, is not the same world that others see. It's quite obvious, yet I'm surprised by how often I forget about it.
That's where the serenity prayer comes in. To be completely fair, my ideas are merely hypotheses and have not yet been proved. So I should just shut the fuck up—at least until I have proved the validity of my statement, at the very least to myself. It is a form of validating your theories that's not really helpful to anyone. If I'm completely honest, my opinions are mostly half-baked; they have a lot more cooking to go through. So my focus is to not shove them down anyone's throat unless asked for explicitly. I'd like to learn to accept things as they are. It is a lot harder than I thought initially. It might be because it "feels" like if you don't defend your position, it holds no value. That it only has value if others believe at least a semblance of it. Not only is it unnecessary, wasted effort, and a huge time sink, but it also shifts your focus from action to talk.
There are enough opinions out there. I think, in some way, the world will be thankful if one more person can keep theirs to themselves. He says, as he writes a blog about it. Too bad—you came here to read about it. That's on you.