Serenity and How It Works

A Thought on the Serenity Prayer

It’s just a few simple lines - often quoted, sometimes overlooked - but the Serenity Prayer holds a kind of magic when life gets turned upside down.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.”

In AA circles, it’s a compass. For me, it became an anchor.

During those long, lonely weeks of waiting between scans, biopsies, and ‘what now’ moments, these words became more than just a prayer - they were a way to calm the chaos of cancer.

Serenity isn’t just peace. It’s a place of being. It’s that moment when the panic subsides just enough for clarity to return. It’s what I begged for in those early weeks after hearing the words “incurable cancer.”

When control vanished, this prayer reminded me where to place my energy, even if it was one moment at a time.

The first line - accept the things I cannot change

This isn’t resignation or defeat. It’s awareness. Some things simply are. A = A, as my mentor says.

A very dear mentor and friend taught me about a great formula for dealing with unexpected challenges, its called the A = A way of thinking.

When something happens, we call this an A moment, normally our brains scramble to make sense of this, to find a correlation in things that have happened in the past, or what we believe to be true, these are what Kerri calls B C D E F and G...we try to make meaning out of a situation.

B is what ha happened to us in the past, C could be our values, D is what we learnt as a child, and E may be something we believe to be true.

Which means when something happens, an A moment, we layer all of these on top to make sense of it and change what it means into something we think to be real.

But that is not really what should happen, what if A = A FFS. It just is, nothing more and nothing less.

That movie you have played in your head with the oscar winning performance is nothing other than a combination of B C D E and F.

A = A FFS...it just is what it is.

The second—the courage to change what I can.

Now this is the active part.

It’s how I chose to show up for treatment, parenthood, and purpose. It’s how I created The Serenity Project.

And then, the real kicker—the wisdom to know the difference.

Wisdom

Wisdom doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it comes in a whisper, during a walk with the dogs or watching the wind move through the trees.

This prayer gave me language when my world was falling apart. It helped me trade panic for presence, even if only moment at a time.

And it gave me the foundation to start helping myself and now others find their own version of serenity.

Not perfection. Not performance. Just presence.