Blog entry for:

and right away. yes and there are days when i still DESIRE all the consequences of doing the footwork, without applying any effort to get them.
this morning i am beat tired and not in the best of moods. i have made the trip to the local county lockup three days in a row, and the trip last night, got me home very late. as i was doing my TENTH STEP last night, i wondered if there was something i was missing and if there was a lesson to be learned. as i quieted myself this morning, and tried to meditate without falling back to sleep, i got the feeling that maybe the lesson i need to be seeing, is that each trip was not a burden, but rather a blessing of sorts. back in the day, i would not have gone out of my way to help anyone, unless there was something in it, for me. each apparently altruistic act i did, always came with a very LARGE string attached and a debt to be repaid, when i demanded it. i am not a victim of the steps and my recovery process, although this morning it feels like it. i CHOOSE to do things for others, such as trip over to Boulder and give them my time and my resources and yes even a bit of of my sleep, because i care today. the footwork i have done, especially over this last set of steps, has made me the person i am today, and the consequence is that some of the time, i actually care enough about the people in my life, no matter how peripheral they may appear.
it is simple to care for and give of myself to those who are a central part of my life. my family and my friends have earned a place in my heart and giving to them is a no-brainer. it is much more difficult, at least to me, to care for my peers in recovery, my former peers, and my future peer, after all, the equation of what i can get out of them, still rattles like an old adding machine in my head. even though i have a day or two clean, i still have to figure out, what is in it for me.
looking at my trips to the west over the past few days, what i GOT, was another day clean. yeah i know, so fVcking cliché that i could puke and start belting out the verses of Kum-By-Yah. be that as it may, each time, oi do something for someone, i learn to care that much more. as i learn to care more and more for those in my life, i start to think less and less of what is in it for me, and the more compelling the footwork to becoming a better person, the person i have always wanted to be, becomes.
going back to what i have learned over the past three days, each and every one of those men i helped were put where they are, because of someone they cared about in their lives. each of them, through their own actions left the door open to give someone else power, and each of them will end up paying for those decisions with their freedom. the irony here, is each of them believed they were doing the right thing at that time, which brings me back to the whole notion of footwork.
how do i know if what i am doing will bring me the results i desire? i have no magic crystal ball that tells me the future, but if my past is any indication, if i keep doing what i have been doing, my future may very well continue to become closer to the ideal i once upon imagined it might be. there certainly are no guarantees that working the steps, implementing an active program of recovery, going to work, furthering my education, and saving for the future will pay off. i am fairly certain that if i do not do that stuff, i will not find myself in a better place tomorrow, which for me may mean i do not get to walk away from Boulder County Jail, without paying a price.

∞ DT ∞