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yesterday was a history lesson, one that chronicled part of who i am becoming. today? well that has yet to be seen.
as i have often shared out loud and certainly in this forum, i did not come to recovery, willing to do anything, as i did not believe i had anything but a legal problem. sitting in the meeting last night, i realized, that for the direction my service to the fellowship has gone, that is certainly not a bad thing, for lots of reasons. not only was i unwilling to adopt this way of life, i saw all the spiritual principles that were being espoused, as being just another layer of bullsh!t. i could recite a litany of each and every member saying one thing, than acting completely contrary to that principle. the hypocrisy was all that i saw, and if it had not been for an untenable consequence, i would have drifted, nay, ran from recovery within those first terrible six months. over and over again, i hear that same refrain from many of the men who have called me their sponsor, across the course of my recovery, and yet here i stay, because this is the most safe and sure thing for me. what do i tell them, when they come whining about who was doing what to whom? the same a priest once said to me, quoting from religious tract, and i do heavily paraphrase, “that what i see is not a collection of recovered people, who live perfectly in the world of spiritual enlightenment, rather a collection of abstinent junkies, doing their best to figure out and do the next right thing, some more successfully than other, but none, perfectly.”
what happens to those who actually get what that means, is the same thing that happened to me. once i stopped looking for all their flaws, and honestly their flaws and mine are on quite public display in the fellowship, and started looking for how their lives had improved, than and only than, was i willing enough to sort of commit to walking a path of recovery. pretty sad, that self-interest and self-centeredness, had to overrule intelligence and rational observation. sad or not, that is how i finally came to the place where i started to get willing, i mean how long can someone like me, obsess about using every single minute of every single day do so, and stay clean. the answer in my case was never discovered, but i am quite certain it was less than the six months that it took for that obsession to be lifted from me. i am also fairly certain, that if i had acted as i originally planned and left this recovery gig behind, one the hammer of prison was lifted from over my head, i would have ended up there.
today, i have a bit of gratitude for those dorky spiritual principles that i once saw as the mark of a loser. being spiritual and being rational and practical are not mutually exclusive states. just for today, i can do my best to be true to myself and even better true to the principles that i espouse. starting with getting on down the road to show up and do the work for which i am well-paid. it is a good day to practice a bit of integrity as well as perseverance, and see what happens.

∞ DT ∞