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i have to live it at home, as well as everywhere else.
okay, i know this was about bringing my life of recovery home. i also know that the set of behaviors the reading speaks about, are ones that i carried on with, for quite some time, mainly because i was single, unattached and had NO home life, in the normal sense. i could practice the principles at home, because i was very rarely at home.
no i own a home and share my life with someone else, who does have a family as well. there are days when the two of us are like ships that pass in the night and the only time we are together is when we are in bed. most of that has to do with commitments we have, beyond our recovery stuff, you know life on life's terms stuff, like work. this reading takes on even more significance for me, as i apply it to my entire life and do my best to attempt to strike a balance between what is and what i would like it to be, in a perfect world.
when i got clean, there was a whole bunch of people running around spouting off about their totems. not being familiar with that belief system, what i discovered is that totems are stacked from least to most important, the most important totem is on top of them all on the pole. they spoke of their totems being from top to bottom: GOD, RECOVERY, SELF and then everything else. although i bought into this and repeated it for quite some time, i realized that like the recovery zombies i often see, all i was doing is spouting dogma, mainly because i did not look to whether or not it really applied to me and whether or not i really accepted it. these days, having returned from the living dead of being unquestioning and unthinking about my place in my recovery program, i see how ridiculous it really was for me, and in fact contrary to what the literature says. ordering my life in such a facile manner was and is not who i am, and as i grow up in the very public forums of the rooms of recovery, i see that being childlike is just another trap for me returning to active addiction. i am not disparaging how anyone else feels or thinks, and certainly not calling anyone a recovery zombie, i am merely stating the facts as i see them apply to me. i was born with a native intellect and i take very few things on FAITH anymore, except for the notion that recovery is giving me a whole new way to live, and part of that new manner of living is learning how to think for myself and see the world through the critical lines that keeps me clean.
IF i was to rely on the totem concept, from top to bottom, for me it would have to be A LIFE IN ACTIVE RECOVERY, THE POWER THAT FUELS MY RECOVERY, and MYSELF just as i am, at this very moment. it is the program that opens the channel to the POWER that fuels my recovery and once that conduit is opened. i GET to learn who i am today and glimpse at who i am becoming. for me, the analogy fails because all three are equally important, with life in active recovery barely nudging the other two out, when push comes to shove. this trinity, comprise who i am and to separate them out and assign value to them, is not what i am about anymore. with that in mind, carrying my recovery home, means balancing a life in active recovery and myself. growing up means having to accept that oi am responsible for more than my bad old self, i am also responsible for creating the life i have in the here and now. i cannot be part of that creative process if i am spiritually napping, so learning to be present all the time, is a task i have been working on for several years now, and am now only starting to get a grasp on how it is done.
this is a program of action and for me the next action i have is to hit the showers and get out of my home and accomplish a thing or two, before relaxing for some football playoff games later today. it is a good day to be clean and more importantly for me, to do my bring my recovery into all my affairs, no matter where they happen to be.

∞ DT ∞