Blog entry for:

in how i approach the challenges life presents to me. i can rail against them, submit to them passively, or look at them as another opportunity for growth, and surrender to the flow of life. to be clear, i do NOT see submitting and surrendering to be different words meaning the exact same thing. submission is passive in my lexicon and surrender is an action. i do not need to get hung up on semantics and can move into what i actually “heard” this morning.
life as a school and the events that fill it, as lessons, it an interesting metaphor. more than once i have wondered “WHY ME,” as life on its own terms unfolded. the answer i get most of the time is “why not!” as cold as that sounds, when i take a peek inside of that response, i see that what i am hearing is that i am not some sort of unique snowflake, who is entitled to have the world spin his way, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three-hundred and sixty-five days a year. i get to experience my life through a series of events, some ecstatically pleasant, some heinously painful and most somewhere in between. i was not chose to suffer or be exulted and am no better or worse than anyone else in the world. i live in a world of comfort because of the accident of my birth and am probably an addict by the same throw of the random genetic dice. i GET the opportunity to live FREE today, because i choose to do so, and when i came into recovery, i lacked that choice. one of the consequences of making that choice is that i have to accept what comes my way. no matter how much i want to disbelieve what the mainstream media is trying to sell me, the fact of the matter is, they very rarely publish anything that is “fake news,” and screaming that they do, at the top of my lungs does not change the facts. in fact, i am grateful to have been born at a time, when critical thinking and evaluation of what is being said, was a valued part of my education. i am no Renaissance man, i but i do have a clue or two about what is going on and like it or not, i am stuck with the here and now, it all its technicolor glory.
what does that mean in the context of recovery and staying clean. it means that today i have a choice. i can choose to live a program of recovery, or choose to be merely abstinent, or even make the choice to visit one of the purveyors of legally available mind and mood altering substances. i can choose to face life, and accept the consequences, good or bad, of that decision and move along. the fact of the matter is, life i almost never fair. justice is something that is bought and sold to the highest bidder and those in power will NEVER relinquish that power until they are forced to do so. knowing all of that, i could melt into a puddle of cold water on the floor, or just accept that and do my best to live as well as i can, taking my lessons from what living well happens to bring to me, today.
so am i always grateful for the opportunities i am presented with to learn how to do life that much better? HELL NO!, i still whine about how unfair it is. i still scream shrilly, why me. and i still wonder how i can prevent those “lessons” from coming my way in the future. the fact of the matter is, i am still human and when given the choice, i take the easier, softer and more comfortable path. no lies, or fake news here today, it juts is the simple facts of my life. the silver lining, if you will, is that as a person who chooses recovery, i can survive the “sturm und drang” of life, learn what i need to learn and share that experience with my peers, without being arrogant or superior. just for today, i can slide on down to work and see what i can learn. just for today i can thrive, rather than survive and allow myself the freedom to face what comes my way.

∞ DT ∞