Blog entry for:

in active addiction, my fellow members may suspect that i am doing nothing more than quoting bumper stickers. this morning, what i heard was the choices i make in living my life are much more important than what i say at meetings. yes i have some clean time, and yes i still have more than a few behaviors that have carried over from my life in active addiction. man it would be nice to just be able to live as some sort of spiritual giant, actually practicing these principles on a constant basis, but one of the things i have learned and am beginning to tolerate about myself is that, i am only human. that does not excuse my lapses in spiritual living, it merely explains them. it would be nice to fall back to that position, rationalizing away my behavior with a simple pass of the "i am only human" wand. alas, i have also worked a couple of twelve step cycles and have learned that i am responsible for my recovery, including doing the best i can to adhere to the principles i so easily espouse.
that kind of puts me into a tough place, live what i talk or face the consequences. that is one thing that has not changed, i still hate facing consequences. the alternative to that is a little more palatable, but not any easier. DANG IT! living the solution is what i NEED to do, so that i may provide HOPE to the newcomers, that there is a reward to living the program. yes i know i am back into the reward and punishment discussion again. but that may not be an entirely bad thing this morning. the REWARD i get for living the program is a desire to stay clean today, NO MATTER WHAT. for me, that is reward enough. the punishment? well for me, it means on more example for the part of me i call my disease to use about exactly how f*cked up i am. with enough of those examples, i can easily convince myself that this whole recovery gig is not paying off, and i might as well use!
today, i want to live a program of recovery, and since i am once again writing this little ditty in cyberspace, i need to live up to the principles, to the best of my ability. i can and will do that, and take care of the l;apses as necessary across the course of my day. it is, after all, a just for today manner of living. so off to face the slings and arrows of this sort of gray day.

∞ DT ∞