Serenity.

It’s only been two weeks (give or take a few days) into the new year and it’s been a relatively spicy one. Wars (plural for emphasis) are still going on, recession, economy is in the bin and Katt Williams decided to talk on a podcast which promptly set fire to my twitter timeline for a few days.

With so many things happening, it is so easy to get overwhelmed with everything all at once and suddenly shut down from the weight and supposed responsibility of it all. I mean, after all, isn’t it right for one to believe in the good of people? To believe that justice will prevail? That life has we know it will be alright?

An anecdote.

It was a late Thursday when I went for dinner with a friend of mine a few years back. A confidante of sorts, who helped me sort out my thoughts the way a therapist usually would (or so I hear). We sat and caught up from our university days, traded stories of love lives before settling on the woes of adulthood itself.

I remember lamenting to her about life and how tired I was about the things I felt and how it all just felt heavy on my heart. About my relationships with people, with things, with the general existential dread of adulthood and I remember her look at me and she said (paraphrasing here)

“You feel to deeply. You need to feel things lightly.”

“Feel lightly? I don’t understand” I asked.

“You don’t have to let things get to you. You can just let it wash over you. Hence, ‘feel lightly’. It’s not everything that you need to feel so deeply.”

–

I think about that moment more often than not. Because it posed a newer more relevant question to me which I have had to ask myself on a relatively consistent basis. What are the things to feel deeply? What are the things to feel lightly? How do we decide which is which?

“God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.“

To quote the Serenity Prayer. I find that in this life, that’s the way I’ve been fortunate to stay atop of it all. The world is and has always been complex. We can only hope to do what we can.