Frank Bruni: What I learned when I stabbed myself 52 times

While you have no control over much of what befalls you, you have plenty of control over your perspective on it, your attitude about it, Frank Bruni writes. (Ben Wiseman/The New York Times) Of all the aphorisms ever inscribed on greeting cards and stitched onto throw pillows, the most frustrating is that ubiquitous snippet of the Serenity Prayer.

“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,” it says, suggesting that the difference is objective — that there’s a discernible, even clear line between reasonable hope and pitiable delusion, between premature and mature surrender. Sometimes there isn’t.…