Dec. 14: It is what it is

 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.

That is the Serenity Prayer, commonly attributed to the American Reformed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The prayer, often uttered at AA meetings, is rarely quoted in its entirety. The full prayer includes pleas for the ability to take life one day at a time, accepting hardships, surrendering to the the will of the almighty. But the first little bit is all anyone remembers. The late American novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, sure remembered it. He ended his novel, Slaughterhouse Five, by describing how those words were inscribed on a locket that hung between the breasts of a pornographic film actress named Montana Wildhack. 

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I have read Slaughterhouse Five a number of times. I think the point of the book is that everyone has good memories and bad memories and that we would be a lot happier if we reminisced about the good times instead of brooding over the last one. It's been observed that life is either looking forward or looking back, that the moment can never be grasped, that it becomes the past a split second after we touch it. 

I think, sometimes, of the phenomenon of the stuck record. You can be listening to the world's most beautiful piece of music - the St. Matthew's Passion, for example - and if the record gets stuck, it will broadcast a single moment in time forever until you fix the record player. The sound will not be lovely. It will be ugly and it will be loud and it will hurt your ears. You will need to restore the flow of time if you want the music to be beautiful again. In this case, music is much like life.

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Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Slaughterhouse Five, is a fatalist. He adopts that worldview after an encounter with aliens, who inform him that every moment - past, present, and future - is structured. In short, the future cannot be changed. The aliens tell him they know how the universe will blow up. Billy tries to tell them they can change the future so the universe does not blow up. The aliens tell him that is impossible. The future is already structured; it can be changed as easily as I could move Mount Everest by poking it with a stick.

What I want to know from Mr. Vonnegut, who was a lifelong atheist, is who did the structuring?

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Fatalism is a dangerous worldview because it can undermine the concept of personal responsibility. Rather than explain myself, I'll allow Messrs Calvin and Hobbes to illustrate:

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The expression "it is what it is" is an extension of the serenity prayer. It is the utterance of someone who has either accepted reality or realizes that trying to change it would take too big of an emotional toll on us.

I can remember the first time I heard it. I was doing a magic show at a fair somewhere in East Ontario. I was expecting a big audience - hundreds of people happily crammed into the bleachers - but instead I just had a dozen or so people sitting on the ground while I performed in the open air. I couldn't use my sound system. Nowhere to plug it in. I had to rely on my natural charisma to keep the audience entertained.

The entertainment committee member who had been assigned to me apologized for how ill prepared the fair was for my show. He said there were a lot of newbies on board and their biggest priorities were the 4H show and the midway. They just couldn't afford to make sure all my needs were looked after.

"It is what it is," he said.

I stumbled through the show and it was a good show all things considered and now, more than a decade later, "it is what it is" has entered our vernacular. I try not to say it myself - still strikes me as irresponsible - but I can't help it.

I guess that it is what it is.