The Challenge of Courage

Now, on to something that's been buzzing around in my noggin' for a while... This is a quote from NY Times columnist David Brooks a few weeks ago:

Epictetus says that some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our desires and responses. But our bodies are not up to us. Neither are our possessions, or our reputations ... Serenity, he says, consists in embracing the things within our control and discarding the things that are not.

I just thought it was a great philosophy to understand, in general. This is essentially the Serenity Prayer (you know, the one that all the 10-steppers follow):

Lord, 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.

Pretty simple really.

In the end all we have is our own selves. Our own actions. As this quote reminds us, we can't even control how our bodies will react over time to age & disease & injury. We can try, but genetics is out of our own control.

What's done is, as they say, done.

Shouldn't we focus on the things we can control? Shouldn't we concern ourselves less with what others think of us, and more on what we think of ourselves?

Shouldn't we accept that the things we create, along with our own thoughts and spoken words, these things we put out into the universe are the only things that are truly, honestly in our control?

The challenge then is having the Courage to raise one's Voice.