The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: “Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks.” I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
– Wendell Barry, Hannah Coulter
Growing up requires you to let go of seeing things the way you want them to be and seeing them instead as they are. I understand the same rule applies to giving thanks and, as it happens, to rejoicing.
Shannon E. Williams 
not to wax too philosophical but i think there is a great deal of S&M in christianist commands to be ever thankful and even rejoice, tho i do appreciate the gist (as much as i understand it) of the serenity prayer.
True that. . . there is also a great deal of rigid soullessness in rationalist tendencies to be forever calculating self-interest and payoff, tho I also subscribe to godless reason in most cases.
ah yeah that’s an impoverished (and just inaccurate) view of human-being, both perhaps assume that we and the world are in some kind of deep correspondence?
Wow – this is SO much where I have been of late – I’ve called it “clipping wishes” – an effort to size my goals/desires/wants to the scale of my present…i’ve been so encouraged by your claiming of all you CAN do versus what you might ache & wish to do/be doing. Thank you
“Clipping wishes.” Yes. . . pruning makes clears the way for fresh growth.