An obviously mentally ill woman came up and began talking to Laura. She was friendly, but speaking so rapidly and so close to my sister’s face that I could tell Laura was a bit taken aback.

“Do I scare you?” the woman demanded, sensing Laura’s discomfort.

“Um,” said Laura. I could see that she was frantically thinking of something polite to say. “No, no, it’s just that I’m a little discombobulated because it is so hot outside.”

“Well, that’s God for ya,” the woman said, and walked away.

“Well, that’s God for ya” became an instant classic in our vocabulary of sisterhood. Whenever anything was beyond our ken, that phrase capped the conversation. We used it for good things and bad, beautiful and ugly.

It always made us laugh and reminded us that, in this crazy world, the answer to so many questions is just “That’s God for ya.”

But it is bigger than that. Stop, look, listen:

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And the wisdom to know the difference.

This one little prayer fully answers the question “How do I get through this crazy life?”

I mean, what percentage of my life is spent resenting what is?

“Why are people so mean?”

“Why did my neighbor paint their house such an ugly color?”

“Why does Microsoft Word suck so badly?”

The prayer offers me two choices – accept it or do something about it.

And accept that I can’t always do something about it.

When my sister was dying, I was driving home from the hospital and saw a billboard for the state lottery. “Jackpot: $68 million!” it said in rainbow colors.

“Huh,” I thought. “Even if I won all that money, I still couldn’t help my sister. There’s nothing I could do.”

It was a shock to my system. There was NOTHING I could do.

Then there are those other times when I have known what needs to be done – I could feel it with every nerve, it kept me up at night – but lacked the courage to do it. So I used “coping skills” -  got depressed, blamed others, fed my addictions to try and keep the pain of failure away.

I know it is easy to spend years dangling between the two poles of resentment and fear.

Eventually, though, if one wants to grow, one has to step out and sort out what can be changed and what can’t.

The Serenity Prayer. 27 words little words that offer a path to sanity and peace. It’s not just for recovery groups anymore.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

If you name a poet, there’s a 78% chance that I’ve never heard of him or her. It’s not that I’m a hater of poetry, it’s more like: I’m mortifyingly ignorant.

With that said, I DO have a favorite poet. It’s Mark Strand.

And I DO have a favorite Mark Strand poem. It’s Make Believe Ballroom Time. And here it is.

“Judging from his suit which was excessively drab but expensive, and his speech which was uninflected and precise, I guessed he was a banker, perhaps a lawyer, even a professor in one of the larger, better universities. It never occurred to me that he might be something else until, during a lull in our conversation, he suddenly got up and began dancing. The others at the party, plainly disturbed by this, affected a more intense involvement in their conversations then was necessary. They spoke loudly, rapidly. But the man continued dancing. And because I recognized what calling, what distant music he obeyed, I envied him.”

I can’t even convey how much I love this.

Personal Goal for 2008: Remember that the people I tend to avoid might be filled to the brim with pleasant surprises.