Accept Fate With Love

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

Marcus Aurelius

The Alcoholics Resource Center (alcoholicsanonymous.com) has a brief summary of the “Serenity Prayer” that also mentions its origins. Basically, it or variations of it goes back centuries, long before AA existed and has been credited to many theologians and saints. Anyone familiar with Stoicism will recognize its opening sentence as something an ancient Stoic might say: “God grant me the serenity / To accept the things I cannot change…” And, according to Donald Robertson , a cognitive-behavioural psychotherapist, “the most fundamental principle of Stoic psychotherapy can be found in the very first sentence of the famous Enchiridion or Stoic ‘handbook’ of Epictetus: ‘Some things are up to us and others are not.’” There’s something comforting that not matter the time in history or origin of the person, we all strive to make sense of the same things.

About the author

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (26 April 121 – 17 March 180) was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors (a term coined some 13 centuries later by Niccolò Machiavelli), and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calmness and stability for the Roman Empire lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.