Blog entry for:

jails, institutions, and death, a threat against which i hardened myself and in the end i became brittle, unable to withstand the merest breath of the winds of life. speaking about winds, at least in the physical sense, man is it blowing around here, it is a good thing that today is a planned day off from my fitness regime, or perhaps better put a planned day off as part of my fitness regime cycle, because the winds are certainly howling out there this morning. running into forty-five mile per hour winds, does not do me a whole lot of good. it gets my pulse rate up, but i am unable to breathe enough to sustain good aerobic activity, and as a result it create the situation in my muscles similar to sprinting, while moving along at a snail’s pace.
oops, i just created a fairly good metaphor about my activity when i am acting in self-will, and more germane, the self-will that brought me to my knees, in my active addiction. i can state without any fear of equivocation, that, at the end of my using career, seven months after my first exposure to the program that eventually gave me all i have today, it felt like day after day, that i was battling the winds, and that any moment i would snap. the consequences had become extreme, my determination not to get caught had become the driving force in my life, and yet somewhere inside, hidden from view, i was creaming for the madness to stop and allow life to become, well, a little less difficult. little did i realize how inflexible, and rigid i had become. little did i realize that what was being said to me over and over again, in the rooms, was all i needed to do. the simple truth is that even though i still had the desire to use, even though using was still working for me, all i needed to do was to wake up and surrender to the fact that it was my active addiction, and it’s most evident symptom -- my uncontrollable use of drugs -- that was the problem, not life itself. once i surrendered to that fact, the wind seemed far less important to me, and i started to learn to live a life in recovery. it took another thirteen months before anything real sank in, i guess as the saying goes ‘some are sicker than others.’
so even though those winds may stop howling, both in the physical sense in the her and now, and it the spiritual sense in my life and psyche. i have a manner of living that teaches me how to bend, rather than break when the gales get blowing again. so on this first day on my brand new annual cycle, i can say that i am grateful to be alive and have the desire to stay clean today. hopefully my program will continue to allow me to be flexible enough to allow me to be a part of life and not like some old rotten tree, brittle and shattered on the ground. so off to the showers and then back to pounding these keys, so i can earn my daily bread.

∞ DT ∞