Image credit: Photo by Ron Layters on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

A month or so ago, I did something I dread and despise: I took a trip on an airplane. When I fly, the joy is entirely in the destination and not at all in the journey. The flight fills me with terror: terror that escalates if the trip is turbulent or if I'm in a small plane where I can feel just how fast I'm rocketing through the air or if I'm seated away from the window, shut in, claustrophobic, with no reference point.

Of course, all of those things happened on one leg of my most recent trip. I missed my connection and lost my carefully selected window seat, and the folks sitting next to the window on each side of me pulled the shades down and went to sleep leaving me trapped blindly in shivering metal. It was a bumpy flight in a small plane, and I could hear and feel the monstrous rush of air all around us. So I prayed and meditated (or tried to) the whole flight. I must have said the Serenity Prayer six million times. And let me tell you, nothing will give you a new outlook on the Serenity Prayer like saying it yourself six million times when you fear that the next moment will bring your violent, fiery death.

I sat on the plane and tried to breathe with lungs that felt like they were constricted to the size of peas and repeated in my head over and over, "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." I'd the first part really hard: grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Ok, I can't change whether or not the plane is going to crash. I can't control the turbulence. I can't control when we land. I can't control whether I live or die. Serenity. Serenity. Come on, bring on the serenity!

Then I'd pray the next parts weakly: the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. After all what can I change? The only thing I really care about is whether or not I die. I really, really want to control that a lot. I could wake the guy next to him and ask him to raise the shade or switch seats with me so that I can have a nice clear view of the engine exploding or the ground approaching at 32 feet per second squared, but that's not actually going to change the thing I want to change. So, back to that first part about the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Stupid, useless rest of the Serenity Prayer.

After a few thousand iterations of this, I started to think about how odd it was that I was in a situation where I was completely powerless to change anything, when it struck me that there was one thing I could still change, the one and only thing I could always change: me. I didn't need the courage to ask for I window seat or the courage to leap up and operate the emergency exit if needed. I needed the courage to change me, the courage to overcome my fear of death, the courage to change the way I perceived this flight.

Oh.

Duh.

So, I started praying both the first and second parts of the Serenity Prayer really hard: the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can. As for that last part — the wisdom to know the difference — I gave a little burst of gratitude each time I got to that, because saw I'd already gotten that part this time around. And I kept praying until the plane touched the ground, safe at my destination.