Blog entry for:

stay clean through whatever life brings me today even IF it is dealing with an old water bed, not being able to wash my clothes at home or having to wade through a pile of shite i have created. yes it is true that i had to dry my dirty clothes because the temporary repair made on our wash machine did not work. yes it is true that oi need to take care of some old lingering responsibilities and deal with a bed that has been part of our lives for the past twelve years. all of this, once upon a time would have made me want to reach for a bit of chemical relief and even though all of that seems very minor in the grand scale of things, it is just part of living in the real world. none of that is worth using today and i have found that i do a fairly good job at handling the BIG things, it is the little annoyances that drive me mad.
the reading was not about handling these little events that occur in my life, it was about identifying and exploding the myths that there are events that may make using the seven percent solution seem like the best choice for me. it is a welcome break to look for things that may have changed over the course of the last year. i do not remember if there is another “reservations” reading in the annual cycle, and it really does not matter. today i get to look for any that may be lingering in the background.
as i sat this morning, there was nothing that bubbled up from the pits of my mind. i can think of many scenarios where i would feel devastated, and each and every one of them, seem as if i can get through them clean. of course what i think today may not actually be what happens in the future. i realize that today and i am very aware of the events that may drive me to the brink. i have FAITH in my recovery program and live it on a daily basis, to help set the using bar, just that much higher.
what i am feeling this morning is a sense of the time has come to start taking care of the resat of me. my oral surgery is complete and i am currently in probably the worst physical shape of my life. i want to be able to do some fourteeners this summer with my friends and i am not willing to give out three-fourths of the way up, in fact i want to be on a summit or two. in order to make that a reality, i need to eat better, start exercising and get a physical to insure that the years of neglect have not made this an “impossible dream.” goals and dreams are one thing, are they attainable is quite another story and the only way i can find out, is to embark on that journey, you know, the meme about starting with the first step.
enough about what is going on inside of me, well not quite. over the past week i have been hearing a recurring theme about what is and is not possible for myself and my peers in recovery. it seems that just staying clean is enough for many of them. even worse that using drug replacement therapy along with a legal substance is somehow worthy of a clean-time celebration. it is not up to me to “judge” the quality of my peers' recovery, but i often do, and it shows up on my tenth step inventory on a regular basis. i have been talking about my biases and prejudices for a bit of time now, and when it gets down to it, i am an old-school “purist” when it come to program stuff. that is more than okay for me, but projecting that expectation on others is far appropriate behavior and it seems that what i think, and what is reality, are not always in sync. part of moving forward into the next round of steps, i getting a focus on what i need to focus on, and more and more it is looking like a deep dive into expectations versus reality.not quite there yet, but is is becoming more and more obvious to me, that i am digging a canyon of difference between myself and my peers, using what i think i KNOW instead of paying attention to what i am feeling. more of course will be revealed and i am ready to wrap this up and see if all my new enhancements work as they are supposed to. it is a great day to be clean.

∞ DT ∞