We often face unchangeable problems. How we face them can keep us from living our moments. We may try to relive the past as if doing so could get it right or prelive the future to solve our problems ahead of time. To come into any moment, especially a moment of worship, it is helpful to recognize where we have power and where we don’t as our path to peace can be found in The Serenity Prayer,
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.
To enter into any moment requires not only recognizing what we can change and what we cannot change, but what we can or cannot change in any given moment. If you have a problem which no action is possible right at that time, then the wise choice in that moment is to recognize what you cannot do and be as fully present as possible. Consider Sophia in this crisis as a model for life,
Sophia was walking along one day when a tiger started to chase her. Running from the tiger, she hurried along the edge of a cliff and fell over. Part way down, she grabbed a vine stopping her fall.
She looked above and saw the tiger looking over the edge at her. She looked below, and there was another tiger at the bottom. The vine she was holding onto started to pull from the side of the cliff. She noticed a strawberry growing on the vine. She pulled it and ate. It tasted very sweet.
In this ancient story, Sophia hanging in peril can taste and enjoy a strawberry because for that moment, the tiger above, the tiger below, and the breaking vine were all out of her control. She could do nothing to change any of them. What she could do was focus on what she did have the ability to do in that particular moment, enjoy the strawberry.
For more wisdom stories, see For the Love of Sophia
