Some Things Are Up to Us — เส้นแบ่งสิ่งที่อยู่ในมือกับสิ่งที่ไม่อยู่Some Things Are Up to Us — Epictetus, Marcus, and the Real Story of the Serenity Prayer

September rain asks nobody's permission. It is 8:12 a.m., the elevated expressway has become a six-kilometre parking lot, and the wipers are swinging away with great diligence — they, at least, are doing their part — while your knuckles whiten on the wheel, because your twenty-four slides are due on a screen at nine thirty and the office group chat has just pinged: "How far along are you?"

The car behind you sounds its horn. You answer in kind. No horn in the recorded history of that expressway has ever moved a single car, and yet we all keep pressing — perhaps because the hand on the horn is the one thing in the car we still truly command. Slow down and look at the lump of misery sitting on your chest in that moment, and try to take it apart: which piece is the rain, which piece is the road, and which piece is a sentence your own mind composed — "if I'm late, it's over"?

The previous essay (on contentment as the greatest wealth) asked how much is enough. This one asks the question sitting one layer beneath it: of everything we are carrying, what is actually ours? Nearly two thousand years ago a lame ex-slave answered it in the opening sentence of one of the thinnest books in the world — and his answer kept travelling, into a religious teacher's diary in 1932, into a Hanoi prison in 1965, and into the meeting rooms of recovery groups in nearly every city on earth, tonight included.

Some things are up to us — and the list is shorter than you think

“Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”

Epictetus, Enchiridion 1 (tr. Elizabeth Carter)

Epictetus was born a slave around AD 50 in Asia Minor. Even his name was not his own — "Epiktetos" literally means "acquired." His master was Epaphroditus, a secretary to the emperor Nero. One of his legs was lame, and the ancient accounts disagree about why — one story says a master broke it, another says disease or birth — the surviving texts decline to settle it. He studied philosophy under Musonius Rufus, gained his freedom, was swept out of Rome along with the city's philosophers under the emperor Domitian, and set up a school at Nicopolis on the Greek coast.

He never wrote a line. What we have are lectures taken down by his student Arrian, then boiled down further into a tiny manual, the Enchiridion — the word means "ready at hand." And the opening sentence of that manual is the sentence above. In Greek: τῶν ὄντων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν, τὰ δὲ οὐκ ἐφ᾽ ἡμῖν. No preamble, no invocation of the gods. The whole book begins by drawing one line^[1]

Read the "ours" column slowly: opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion — startlingly short. Then notice something else: the body is on the other side. The man who sorted things this way was not a rich man on a soft bed; he was a former slave who knew better than anyone what an owner can do to one's flesh. His proposal is not armchair philosophy. It is the survival plan of someone who once owned nothing at all — except the one thing no one can confiscate, the mind's stance toward what happens.

The textbooks call this idea the dichotomy of control. What the sentence does not say matters as much as what it says. It does not say the outer world is unimportant, does not tell you to stop trying, and does not say that whoever suffers must be thinking wrongly. It says only: do not deposit your peace of mind in a locker you hold no key to. And the commonest way to misuse it is to turn it on other people — "it's all in your head" — when Epictetus drew this line for each of us to lay against our own lives, never to scrawl across someone else's pain.

A small footnote for an age in which quotations travel faster than their owners: many of the polished lines circulating under Epictetus's name — "Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.", for one — appear nowhere in the actual texts, being free modern paraphrases (several trace to Sharon Lebell's 1995 interpretive version), to the point that Wikiquote keeps a dedicated "Misattributed" section to catch them. The habit of checking a source before passing it on is the same discipline this essay is asking you to practise — knowing exactly what belongs to whom.

It is not the thing that disturbs you

“If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgement about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgement now.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47 (tr. George Long)

This stream of thought flowed from a slave to a throne within a single generation. Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, records in the opening pages of his private notebook that he owes his teacher Rusticus for introducing him to "the discourses of Epictetus, which he communicated to me out of his own collection"^[2] The notebook was later titled Meditations, but its own name is far plainer — Ta eis heauton, "to himself." He wrote it in army camps along the Danube, in the middle of a war and a plague that swept lives across the empire, several of his own children among them. Not one line was meant to be read.

Entry 8.47 is usually quoted only as far as its first clause, but the full entry takes three more steps, and those steps change everything. If you are pained by something outside you — correct the judgment. If you are pained because you have not yet done what you believe you should — "why dost thou not rather act than complain?" And if the obstacle truly exceeds your strength — then do not grieve, for its cause does not lie in you. Read slowly and a three-way structure appears: reframe, act, or let go — and yes, it is the structure of a prayer the world would compose some seventeen hundred years later, which is exactly where we are heading next.

One caution. The line most shared under Marcus's name — "You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." — appears in no known translation of the Meditations. Wikiquote files it under Misattributed, noting it may be a loose paraphrase of entry 4.3. The difference is not scholarly fussiness: the counterfeit promises you will "find strength"; the original hands you a chore — go and audit your own judgment — and its author was not writing from a summit of achievement. He wrote it over and over, morning after morning, like a man who still could not quite do it. Which is the most consoling thing about the notebook: even an emperor had to remind himself daily.

The prayer that was credited to the wrong people for decades

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Reinhold Niebuhr, early 1930s (in the wording that later became standard)

You have seen it on keychains, on hospital walls, in a frame at your grandmother's house — and if you have ever sat in on a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, you know it has opened those rooms since the 1940s. AA's early groups stumbled on it in a New York newspaper's obituary page in mid-1941 and adopted it. For decades it wore other people's names — Saint Francis of Assisi, various anonymous ancient divines — until America's foremost quote detective got involved, and the story became a two-layer parable about intellectual humility.

Layer one. The family of Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent American theologian, always maintained that he composed it; his daughter wrote an entire book (2003) pinning the composition to a service in the village church of Heath, Massachusetts, in 1943. But in 2008 Fred Shapiro — the Yale law librarian who edits the Yale Book of Quotations — searched the newly digitised newspaper archives and found the prayer in print eight times between January 1936 and April 1942, seven years before the family's date, and not one printing named Niebuhr. The oldest sat in a YWCA activity notice from Syracuse in early 1936. Shapiro concluded, carefully, that Niebuhr had probably "absorbed" a formula already floating in the air — a painful conclusion but not an accusation, since Niebuhr himself, asked while he was alive, had modestly conceded he might have taken in the idea from some forgotten source^[3]

Layer two. The evidence kept digging itself up. A year later another librarian surfaced a 1937 Christian student newsletter crediting "the prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr" outright, and in 2014 Shapiro himself found the two pieces that closed the case. The first was an article by Winnifred Crane Wygal — a YWCA leader and a student of Niebuhr's — in The Woman's Press of March 1933, carrying the earliest known version: "Oh, God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what can not be helped, and insight to know the one from the other." The second was Wygal's own diary, dated October 31, 1932: "R.N. says… 'The victorious man in the day of crisis is the man who has the serenity to accept what he cannot help and the courage to change what must be altered.'" R.N. is Reinhold Niebuhr. Shapiro published a public correction under a headline to the effect of "I was wrong": the new evidence establishes with high confidence that Niebuhr did originate the prayer, with Wygal writing it down and spreading the earliest versions through the YWCA network — which neatly explains why every early printing surfaced in exactly those circles. And what remains unknown can simply be said plainly: no wording from Niebuhr's own hand survives from the early 1930s^[3]

Why does this belong in an essay about what is in our hands? Two reasons. First, the prayer is Epictetus's line with the two missing words added — courage, because the changeable side of the line is not a spectator's seat, and wisdom, because the real line is never as easy to draw as the manual makes it look. Second, its own story is a demonstration piece: Shapiro stood on the wrong side of the facts for six years, then corrected himself in public. Accepting what the evidence says, when you wanted it to say otherwise, is itself a form of "serenity to accept" — the scholar's edition.

A laboratory in Hanoi

September 9, 1965, over North Vietnam. An A-4 attack jet skimming the treetops at five hundred knots flew straight into a flak trap. Fire everywhere; the control system shot away. The pilot pulled the ejection handle — and under the parachute, in the last thirty seconds of his freedom, watching a village main street float slowly up to meet him, James Stockdale, commander of a carrier air wing, whispered to himself: "Five years down there, at least. I'm leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus."^[4]

Why would a fighter pilot think of a slave philosopher in that second? Rewind three years. In 1962 Stockdale was sent to Stanford for a master's degree in international relations, and his heart was not in it. One morning he wandered into the university's philosophy corner and met Philip Rhinelander, the dean who taught a course called "The Problems of Good and Evil." Rhinelander took him in mid-term and added a private tutorial, one hour a week, in the study of his own home. At their last session, the professor reached up to his wall of books and brought down a slim volume — the Enchiridion — with a sentence Stockdale would remember for the rest of his life: "As a military man, I think you'll have special interest in this. Frederick the Great never went on a campaign without a copy of this handbook in his kit." Three years later, on a carrier in the Pacific, the air wing commander's bedside reading was not paperwork. It was Epictetus's Discourses^[4]

Then came the day it all had to be used. He landed in the village street and was beaten by the crowd for two or three minutes before a policeman's whistle reached him, his leg so badly broken he knew at once it would be with him for life — and it was. In the pain he recalled the words of the lame slave who wrote the manual: "Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the Will." In the seven and a half years that followed in Hanoi's prisons, he was tortured fifteen times, held over four years in solitary confinement, and kept two years in leg irons^[4]

In prison, Epictetus's line stopped being a theory. His body — in the guards' hands. His release date — in the war's hands. But his opinions, his aims, his loyalty, and the standards of his men — in his. As the senior naval officer in the prison system, he sent orders through the wall-tap code, orders a tortured man could actually obey rather than slogans that collapse in the first interrogation room: don't bow for the cameras, stay off the radio, admit to no "crimes." And when a man was broken past his limit and came back whispering through the wall, "I am a traitor," the customary tapped reply was: there are no saints in here — you should have heard what I confessed; get up, and get back in ranks. Systematic forgiveness of one another was one more thing that lay within their hands^[4]

The autumn of 1969 was the darkest chapter. He was caught with a covert note which, under further torture, would have implicated his friends. On the night before the day his captors announced they would make him spill everything, alone in the torture room, he broke the window and cut his wrists with the shards — not surrender, but the last card that was still his to play: his jailers needed him alive and usable, and he refused to be used as an instrument against his own people. A guard found him in time; a doctor saved his life. That same week — he learned it only years later — his wife Sybil was standing before the world's press in Paris, demanding humane treatment for the prisoners. Stockdale recorded it in a single sentence, flat and heavy: "Prison torture, as we had known it in Hanoi, ended for everybody that night."^[4]

A few months on, moved back within signalling range of the other cell blocks, he found a note left for him under a washroom sink by a fellow prisoner named Dave Hatcher — coarse paper, written in ink made from rat droppings, no signature, no comment, only the closing verse of Invictus: I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. This is not, in the end, the story of one iron man; it is the story of a group of men who used the same line until it became a culture. And notice the thing most readers get wrong — the line did not make them resigned. It told them where to fight. Stockdale declined to burn his heart on a release date that was not in his hands precisely so he could spend all of it on what was: the next order, the next standard, the daily weaving of his men into something tighter. Serenity and courage can live in one life — and perhaps only when they live together is either one real.

What the research says — and doesn't

Modern psychology followed this trail almost without meaning to. In 1966 Julian Rotter proposed the idea of locus of control — people differ in whether they believe outcomes depend on their own actions (internal) or on luck, power, and other people (external) — together with a scale that became one of the most used instruments of the century^[5] Fifty years of work since has repeatedly found that external beliefs go with moderately higher depression and anxiety — a meta-analysis pooling 152 samples, more than thirty thousand adults across 18 cultural regions, puts the correlation around .30^[6] But two warnings come attached. First, this is a correlation, not an arrow of cause. Second, its size varies by culture — in more collectivist societies like ours the link is clearly weaker than in individualist ones. Interdependence is not a pathology, and for many Thais "in my hands" may really mean "in our hands"^[6]

The second stream is psychotherapy. Albert Ellis cited Epictetus directly from the 1950s on, and Aaron Beck, the father of cognitive therapy, wrote in his foundational 1976 book that the philosophical roots of the approach reach back to the Stoics. The technique now called cognitive reappraisal — catching the mind's automatic verdict and re-examining it — is the direct descendant of Meditations 8.47.

But modern evidence also draws a line around the line itself. Troy and colleagues (2013) measured reappraisal ability in 170 people who had recently been through severe real-life stress, and the result came out shaped like a pair of scissors: among those whose stressor was uncontrollable, better reappraisal went with less depression; among those whose stressor was controllable — fixable by acting — the very same skill went with more depression^[7] In plain terms: reframe a storm and you profit; reframe a leaking tap instead of picking up the wrench and you lose. Not everything is "just a judgment." Some things are taps waiting for someone to tighten them.

My favourite study in this line chose its title deliberately — "The Wisdom to Know the Difference" (2016), lifted straight from the prayer. Researchers had 74 people report by phone ten times a day for a week, and found that those with the highest well-being were not the ones who reappraised most often but the ones who picked their moments — using it more in situations they could not control, less in situations they could, while sheer frequency of use predicted almost nothing^[8] A small sample and only correlational, yes — but its direction matches a two-thousand-year-old sentence remarkably well: no tool is sacred in itself; matching the tool to the situation is.

Here is my own view. The line between what is and is not in our hands is not visible from an armchair; mostly we discover that something "can be changed" only after we have put our weight against it. So my personal rule runs opposite to the popular image of the Stoic: presume the thing in front of you is changeable until it proves otherwise — let serenity be the verdict after the homework is done, never the excuse before starting it. And the other side must be said just as plainly: poverty, illness, injustice are not the "judgments" of the people carrying them. Whoever uses Epictetus to tell the exploited that their suffering lives in their own heads is not teaching philosophy — they are dodging their own share of the work.

Try it this week

Epictetus supplies the line, Niebuhr adds the courage and the wisdom — and our practice needs nothing but one sheet of paper and a pen.

Ask yourself again on Sunday

The next rain is certain. Same road, cars just as motionless. What need not be the same is your hand on the horn — because this time you may have left the house twenty minutes earlier (left column), called ahead to move the slot the moment the sky darkened (left again), run one last rehearsal of the presentation out loud in a car that is going nowhere (also left) — and released the rain, the road, and the nine-thirty slot to the right column, where they always belonged. The suffering that remains after we have done our whole part — Epictetus never promised it would be zero. Only that it becomes light enough to hold without spilling on the people beside us.

Epictetus gives us the line. Marcus shows how to apply it to one's own mind, one day at a time. Niebuhr adds the two words that keep it from becoming an alibi — courage, and wisdom. In the next essay we turn to the asset that is in our hands far more than we act like it is: time, in How We Spend Our Days.