The Serenity Prayer Grant me: Someone quoted this on a prime time television show I watched the other day. It was one of the few times that TV made me think. Generally it's just a mindless activity, saving you the trouble of thinking for yourself. This time though, the story and that poem really caught me off guard. So often in my life, it's been easy to blindly go along, doing the work that's put in front of me and spending the rest of the time taking up space. Rarely do I actively think about my surroundings. Rather, I accept them passively and move on. Rarely do I ever make it to the essential first step of that little poem: evaluation. I don't even know if a thing can be changed or not, let alone need serenity or courage. I've spent the last little while actually looking around. Paying attention to the events in my home town, Canada, the world. Now, I'm feeling ashamed of myself. Not only of myself, but of my way of life, my social standing, my gigantic impact on the Earth. I feel that I'm letting down my ideals. It's complacency, I think, that's been my biggest problem. My world is very comfortable and that is unlikely to change very much during my lifetime. I've been fortunate enough to have parents who could afford to send me to university, and now I have a high probability of having an income level high enough to live the life I'm used to. I'll probably marry someone of similar education and income level as me and we'll have children who will also live the priviledged life of upper middle class. But now, now I'm frozen with a feeling of complete helplessness. The problems in the world, the country, this city are so overwhelming that it's tempting to retreat back to my warm comfortable cocoon of complacency. Then I ask myself: now that I see the problems, can I really turn away? |