From the Serenity Prayer to Stoicism’s revival today

It is surprising how many people with no church background can quote the ‘Serenity Prayer’ attributed to the German theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr: ‘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’.

I can’t think of a wiser prayer in a world like ours where so much is beyond our control. It helps us to concentrate on what really matters; how we handle a crisis and how we can find peace. Yet the heart of that prayer can also work for anyone, even an atheist, and in fact it is the first principle of a system of thought called Stoicism.

‘The single most important practice in Stoic philosophy,’ say Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman in The Daily Stoic, ‘is differentiating between what we can change and what we can’t. What we have influence over and what we don’t.’ It’s the same core idea as in Niebuhr’s prayer.