4:30

After 4:00 AM, I don't mind losing sleep quite so much.  During the first part of the night, or the black middle, failing to drift off feels crushing, a deeply personal lapse committed against the backdrop of the universe's unstinting indifference.

But after 4:00 AM, acceptance creeps in.  You may as well get up, because you're not sliding back into unconsciousness anytime soon. Though it's still pitch dark, the birds are restive.

And you are alone.

I get up and pad as noiselessly as I can through the darkened rooms of my house.  The HVAC system is quiet.  The rain has lifted.  Everyone else is asleep.  Even the cat, who never sleeps and yet always seems to be some degree of comatose -miraculous in the commonplace way of cats- lies still.  In an hour or two, my obligations will snap shut around me.  But not quite yet.

Serenity Now!

Although it verges on trite, I am passingly fond 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.

As the last line hints, making the distinction between changeable and immutable can be troublesome. 

But the difficulties don't end there, because, as so many bromides do, this one fails to account for, well, life.

To wit:

The non-binary nature of fungibility.  Alas, mutability is a continuum.  Many things can be changed- but only a little bit.  Or a thing can sustain serious alterations, but remain profoundly problematic.  Do you really still want to get out of bed and put on clothes in order to very slightly improve your relationship with your mother?  Which brings me to my next quibble...

Opportunity cost.  Say I can make a change, but only if I put forth Herculean effort.  Or effort that is less than Herculean, but is still effort.  I could have spent that time eating lemon cake.  I could have husbanded my emotional energy and therefore  had the fortitude not to snap at my coworker when she once more failed to note an important event in her calendar.  I could have taught my coworker to use her calendar.  I could have cured cancer.  Instead I staggered around trying to make a life change.  Ergo...

Unintended consequences.  Say you make your change, but then you don't have the energy to cure cancer.   Or say you make your change, but in making that change, you have created another, bigger problem: You may have cured cancer, but now overpopulation will decimate the globe.  You may now have enough pasta salad, but all your relatives are vomiting. Which means you will now spend an even greater proportion of your life than you had previously estimated cleaning up bodily fluid -an eventuality you could accept as unchangeable, but actually yourprobably could have changed your fate had you not embarked on your Quixotic quest to rip apart the fabric of the universe in the first place. 

I am not serene.  This is some false advertising.