Blog entry for:

the urge to use can sometimes be overwhelming. day by day, i hear more and more about what some friends have devolved into, and each time i hear this new drib or drab, i get a sense of where i could be going as well. i am no different from them, and to sink to the point that one is willing to steal from a sick and dying friend is, well… oh i am certain, that there are mitigating circumstances and if i was in their shoes, i would do the same. i cannot disagree with that statement, as i am certain i would do the same, which brings me back to the death of my spirit that active addiction would foster.
way back when i was sentenced to recovery, this whole notion of spiritual versus worldly was totally lost on me. i was certainly very worldly and anything that i could not myself quantify, or could not be quantified by scientists, who i saw as an extension of myself, was more than likely just peasant superstition. the unexplainable, was just that unexplainable, and did not need to be attributed to some sort of mythic bearded deity who knew everything and could do anything and yet chose to allow the suffering in life on life's terms to occur all the time.
my spiritual outlook is not that much different today, except for the fact that i have an intuitive sense, that something has given me the power to stay clean and continues to fill provide that, every day that i ask. i call that power, the POWER that fuels my recovery and leave it at that. the spiritual path, that i have heard spoken of in meetings and in the fellowship in general, is doing the next right thing, whether or not anyone ever sees me doing it. i would love to say i do it with no motive in mind, and perhaps that is even the case, but i always know that i feel better when i do the next right thing, and that is certainly reward enough for me, most of the time.
as one that does believe in life everlasting, the whole spiritual burden of the sins of my fathers and passing my sins on to those who come after me, is not a concept i buy into, so for someone like me, i have to make the most of each day, doing the next right thing and choosing not to do the next wrong thing, as i will be tallying the results at the end of this day, to see how well i did or did not do. everything for me, at least in this spiritual realm, is focused on today and today only, and i really do not care about what happens when i 𔔔shuffle off this mortal coil.”
when i walked into the rooms, it was all about what you had,, what i wanted and what i needed to do to get it. if it scratched a particular itch that i had, i had no compunction about lying, thieving and manipulating my way to getting it, regardless if you were a friend or not. more importantly if i detected any weakness in you, i used that to my advantage and never thought twice about things like: honor, honesty, integrity or respect. i am certain that is where i will end up, if i choose to use today and the faces in the mirror today is mine. i once felt envious of those who could use and slide through life with a minimum of consequences, and even those consequences were not all that heinous. today, after example after example, i no feel anything but a certainty that for me, to use is to die, in certainly more ways than one. are these living examples being provided by the POWER that fuels my recovery, for my benefit? hardly, they are just addicts who decided to use and to revert to what they once were. no one needs to use to show those of us who choose not to, how bad it is out there, we know, as we were once there as well.
anyhow, time to get rolling and off to make the doughnuts. it is a great day to be clean and one that i will do my best not to end up with a needle in my arm.

∞ DT ∞