Blog entry for:

instant gratification, as faded over time, but has yet to be removed. in fact i just bought a Fire Stick on Amazon Prime day, and the day is still very young. the reading was not about instant gratification, per se, but i got that notion as i sat this morning. patience, certainly can be defined as deferring gratification, but it can also go hand in hand with tolerance, acceptance and yes , surrender. i was however talking about the application of patience in my life, as evidenced by my increasing desire to defer gratification and work towards things and goals that are just now beyond my grasp.
i hear my peers, raving all the time about how “well” they are becoming. they are so much more this or that and their lives are the country and western cliché song played backwards. however, when what they say and how they look does not match up with what they are doing <BOOM> the lies fly and they start the justification shuffle. that behavior is very familiar to me, as it was and can be one of my main driving factors, when i decide that maybe i am not getting the gifts of recovery fast enough or i am not accumulating enough material possessions, or i do not have every single second of my life filled with absolutely everything, but really have nothing going on. when i get too busy to honor the commitments i make, i have to wonder what the fVck am i really chasing and what the fVck is different in my life, now that i am clean and purportedly working a program of active recovery.
which brings me sort of awkwardly back to the main topic of PATIENCE. it is true, that although i was probably addicted from the very first use, i used for twenty-five years and has more than enough time, to get some rather nasty tendencies ingrained in my lifestyle and how i react to the world. why would i expect that just because i am clean, they would be instantly lifted and i would become what i never was, genuine, whole and self-assured?
what is it that i am really trying to say? well that patience with myself does not come easily. that trait is passed on to those in my life, i am not patient with them either, and impatience leads to expectations and expectations leads to all sorts of assorted feelings, first and foremost is anger and resentments.
where i see this coming together today, is that no matter how fast i want to improve my life, myself and the world around me, it is all a process that is operating on a time scale beyond my ken. sure i am getting better, and as i get better, things look brighter around me. sure i can forgive others for being self-centered and self-obsessed pricks, as they forgive me just the same. for me, the most important aspect of this whole little exercise is that this morning and today i can be more than i was yesterday and certainly allow myself the freedom to find a different manner of reacting to the the trespasses against me, real or imagined. after all, in the long run a bruised feeling or two is not going to make me use.
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∞ DT ∞