Acceptance or Complacency?

Within the addiction recovery community, there's great familiarity with the first stanza of the Serenity Prayer:

     God, Grant me the serenity
     to accept the things I cannot change;
     courage to change the things I can;
     and the wisdom to know the difference.

It is easy, almost natural for those of us dealing with addiction to at times twist acceptance into permission to coast. Most everything that challenges us gets filed into the "cannot change" category before we can even really unpack it and see what's at the root of the issue. Even when we know that something we've done or said caused the situation, we'll pile on layers of comforting (if false) blame for the purposes of absolution. If we aren't careful, we can at times convolute stories about things in our lives in a way that absolves us from any responsibility.

Acceptance does not mean complacency, although the latter far too often is confused for and replaces the former. It can be critical for the sake of our own mental, spiritual and emotional health to rightly practice acceptance, and it can be just as vital to all of the above that we reject and move away from complacency. It's important that we don't waste time obsessing over or lamenting things completely out of the realm of our control or influence, and that we take great care to differentiate between things we can control (only our own thoughts, words and actions) and things we can influence, in addition to those things that fall out of either realm.

I heard it said that in this context acceptance is accepting the things you can't change, while complacency is accepting the things you can change, and by extension not doing anything about them. The courage to act is not always easy to access, which is why we ask for it in the Serenity Prayer. Doing the right thing sometimes really takes guts.

Once we land on the realization that we cannot truly control anything beyond our own thoughts, words and actions it all begins to look a bit differently. It takes a different kind of courage to confront the hard truth of your own shortcomings and do something about them. As much of a challenge as pushing against an external status quo can present, struggling against your own nature is monumentally difficult. This is the first battle to be fought and many times it leads to others, but nothing else can be rightly tackled until we toe this line.

Don't let the idea of acceptance become warped into permission to be passive and complacent. Acceptance is an act, and in truth it is an act of courage. It is the act that begins your climb up the mountain, but having the courage to change the things you can is what helps propel you toward the peak.