Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian who wrote mainly about power, politics and justice. He was not an author of prayers and set little store by the genre.
At some point he nevertheless wrote one, of three lines. Give me the calm to accept what I cannot change, the courage to change what I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
It is the dichotomy of control, divided into the same two boxes Epictetus had described eighteen hundred years earlier, together with the third skill that carries the whole exercise: the distinction itself.
Whether Niebuhr had read Epictetus has never been established. He did not name him, and by that time the thought was so widespread that you could pick it up anywhere.
The dating is still debated. His daughter Elisabeth Sifton dated the prayer to 1943, for a service in the village of Heath in Massachusetts. Researchers later found printed versions from the second half of the nineteen thirties, pointing to an earlier origin.
What is certain is that during the Second World War it was distributed on a large scale among American servicemen, and that Alcoholics Anonymous adopted it shortly afterwards. By that route it has probably become the most spoken Stoic sentence in the world, repeated daily by people who have never heard the name Epictetus.
Niebuhr himself attached little importance to it. His substantial work on politics and ethics is read by specialists; these three lines by millions.
You write down something small you think does not matter, alongside the work you think does.
The tempting sorting is that this is a story about good ideas finding their own way. That is precisely what it does not show.
The spread of this prayer lay entirely outside Niebuhr. He did not choose that it would end up in army kits, nor that Alcoholics Anonymous would adopt it, nor that his own books would be read less than three lines he jotted down in passing.
What did lie with him was the writing down. And the sentence that came out of it contains exactly the sorting that describes that difference, which is the neatest loop this collection of cases has to offer.
The third line is the most important and is skipped most often. Calm and courage are the outcomes; the wisdom to know the difference is the work. Without that third skill you acquiesce in what you could have changed, or fight with what is fixed.
The prayer is often used to justify resignation, and that is precisely the reverse of what it says. Whoever remembers only the first line gets a pious-sounding reason to do nothing about matters that genuinely could be changed.
And there is a difficulty in the third line that is never mentioned. The distinction between what you can and cannot change is rarely clear in advance; you usually only find out by trying. The wisdom being asked for is therefore largely available in hindsight, which makes the prayer more honest than its users often are.
What have you made or said whose whereabouts you no longer know? And would you still give it away if nothing anywhere said it was yours?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions