Blog entry for:

a habit of looking at myself, my actions, attitudes, and relationships on a regular basis.
let me get the the boring stuff out of the way. yes i take a DAILY PERSONAL INVENTORY. yes i feel it is one of the most valuable tools (and i really hate calling the stuff that is a part of my recovery tool, but when in Rome…) that i have. and yes, yes and yes, it is something that i wrote for what seems like forever and have discovered another means of taking on a daily basis, without the need for pen and paper.
okay, the preaching to the choir part is done. why was it important to get that out of the way? because, i have a different track to go down this morning. as i am starting to thaw the glacier that is the current state of my progress in STEP THREE, i can see how my daily inventory is starting to help me feel my way through this step. what i have been hearing in my daily inventory was a few related questions. did i have FAITH today, without a preponderance of evidence? what did i accept on FAITH today? did i make the decision to surrender my WHOLE will and life into the care of the POWER that fuels my recovery? i know very basic stuff, but burning questions in my current recovery. the wonderful part of doing something nearly every day for days and days and days on end, is that i get to allow it to morph into something that while part of my ritual, perpetually changes to meet the needs of this addict in the here and now. the inventory i take is one of those things. the first question is something that is crucial and just writing it down i feel like i have ratted myself out. up until this point, i required evidence to have FAITH. even to FAITH that this process could and would work for me, required my seeing, evaluating and accepting the evidence that the lives of the members i saw in the rooms were better because of the recovery process. unfortunately for me, back in the day, that meant the obvious signs of material success, and as a result i came to believe that a new car equaled recovery. i also came to believe that romantic relationships equaled recovery. underneath the conscious layer of my thoughts i knew that building a belief system based on material or romantic success was not going to sustain for any length of time, and as the step process stripped off the garbage that culture, active addiction and my own desires piled on top of the real me, i came to see, that the process was revealed in spiritual rather than material ways. those who really had what i wanted may not have the most stuff or even a romantic relationship at all, what they had was a serenity and stability, that had always eluded me in my life. so in my second THIRD STEP, when the box exploded and the POWER that fuels my recovery was released to morph into whatever IT was, i became free, and the preponderance of the evidence was that i was being cared for, despite my best efforts not to acknowledge that care. that is how it has been ever since, and the new direction of my daily inventory is evidence, that is in the process of changing, i am recovering BECAUSE i am doing the footwork. the POWER that fuels my recovery is caring for my will and my life, because i decide to allow IT to care for me. my FAITH is growing because i am growing, not because, like the district attorney, i am collecting enough evidence to remove the shadow of any doubt.
anyhow, moving back into a full-time employment gig is going to be interesting. i know now that this is part of the caring HIGHER POWER's direction for me, as i feel it in my soul. so as always, when i believe, i act with dispatch and that is where i will go today. in fact i am running behind schedule as this went a bit further and longer than i thought it would when i first sat down, it is a good day to recover, it is a good day to have a belief system on which i can rely and it is a good day to do the next right thing, which is to get moving into the real world. so off to the showers i go, and oh yeah, the running starts again tomorrow.

∞ DT ∞