Teeter-totter

Teeter-totter

Greetings, fellow trudgers “on the road of happy destiny”…

I stumbled across a reading the other day I thought notable not just for what it says, but for its author, Reinhold Neiburh. Some may recognize Nieburh as the American theologian attributed with having written the original poem from which was derived the now-legendary Serenity Prayer:

“Man, who stands at the juncture of nature and spirit, is the subject of both freedom and necessity. On the one hand, he is involved in the order of nature and is therefore bound. On the other hand, as spirit he transcends nature and himself and is therefore free. Being both bound and free, both limited and unlimited, he invariably experiences anxiety.

“To teeter at the extremes of self-love and self-loathing, to pursue perfection because we despise our imperfections—is to find neither satisfaction in successes nor wisdom in failures. We tend to sway precariously on the teeter-totter of life, running from one extreme to the other, missing the point that the only stable place to be is in the mixed-up middle. In reality, that is the only place we can be.”

The Serenity Prayer reads,

“God, grant me the Serenity

To accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

and Wisdom to know the difference.”

Happy trails!