I've long been a fan of the Serenity Prayer, apart from any particular religious context:

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.

Although it is most often associated with addiction recovery, the basic ideas in the Serenity Prayer are relevant to a number of other things, such as the illusory choice behind "choosing" romantic partners and connections to other bodies of thought, such as the Taoist concept of wei wu wei.

It occurred to me recently, when my mind was wandering to and fro, that the Serenity Prayer is also relevant to our current problems with maintaining focused attention, which has received enormous scholarly and popular —umm—attention in recent years. (I've meant to write about it for the longest time, but I keep getting distracted.) Many of us struggle to reclaim our attention these days when there are so many things claiming it, from the never-ending news cycle reporting on crises erupting around the world to social media pushing post after post—oh, there's a new one now (made you look)—to ordinary things in our personal........

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