JUDY EMERSON Author and Personal Coach

On Wednesday I folded laundry while listening to a podcast, the random episode spontaneously offered up to me by my Alexa device. It turned out to be an episode I’d already heard, which I had loved so very much—it made me cry. Hearing it again, I felt prompted to journal. I don’t always heed the prompts, but this time I did. And when I do write, I’m always talking to myself.

The podcast included a story by a man who taught writing classes in a prison. One of his students was an old-timer, two-thirds through a decades-long incarceration for crimes he’d always acknowledged he’d committed. The prisoner described early years behind bars filled with rage against his circumstances. But eventually he came to acceptance of his reality—he decided to be the best prisoner he could be. And he began to change, for the better. He found meaning, peace, and transformation within the walls of the prison.

All of us live in the irrefutable reality of our current circumstances. I have THIS, but I can’t have THAT. Our lives will always be precisely what they are—but we can change the stories we tell ourselves about them, and we can make today different than the past. Does my story about myself define my situation as a prison? As deprivation, victimization, disadvantage, or being profoundly misunderstood? It’s still the stuff that has already happened. That’s background. What will I do with today?

Some of my personal limits: I was born female, not male, to overwhelmed and impoverished teenaged parents in the United States, who carried deep wounds, fears, rage, and little support. Who would I have been planted into a different family, in Guatemala or Mozambique or Germany or anywhere else in the world? I’d be a different person entirely. The specifics of my environment shaped my character and the choices available to me from day one.

I’m constrained by my DNA, my resources, and the design of my own personality—none of which directed me toward becoming an astronaut or a movie star.  I accept I’ll never win a Nobel Prize. Those truths about me enable a broad set of choices, but naturally screen off other possibilities. I can see the constraints that define me as bars to rail against. I can gaze beyond those parameters with envy for other lifetimes not my own.

“If wishes were horses, we’d all have a ride,” my grandmother used to say. I can spend my life wishing. Or I can accept the truths of my life.

“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.” These are my daily tasks.

I’ve spent too much of my life beating my head against the “bars”, resentful for past losses, perceived injustices, and a past that can only be what it was. How much time have I wasted in ignoring and sabotaging what good has always been available—blessings heaped all around me and within me?

I can learn to be “the best prisoner I can be” within the life circumstances I inhabit. I can recognize, accept and apply all those many gifts given to me, and quit eyeing other people’s resources (which are mixed in to a pile of difficulties unique to their story).

My old fantasies of being anything other than just myself, in any moment other than this one, only keep me from accessing the blessing right in front of me. God gave me a repeat of that podcast as a blessing, for this renewed awareness to be present to this day, on my path, defined by the life I’ve been given. Today is the only day possible to activate my choices, to make my life what I want it to be now.

(Here’s the link to the podcast. I recommend it highly: ‘Modern Love Podcast’: Andrew Garfield Wants to Crack Open Your Heart – The New York Times),