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spirit by staying clean, just for today. just for yesterday? well it certainly did not follow the plan i had laid out, as i started my day. there were frustrations as well as triumphs and certainly nothing so big that i wanted to change the way i felt. it does mean that i will be out and about for a bit longer than i originally planned today. it is after all, what it is.
popping the topics off the stack, as it were, the next thing that came up this morning was this little exercise of dropping my recovery style musings on to the interwebs. the original plan was to write the web application that did the work, do ten or twelve postings and use it as part of my portfolio. the days and week rolled by, i realized that here was a pl;ace i could share honestly and openly and sort of anonymously about whatever the fVck was going on inside of me. here i had a forum that the only constraint i had, was to leave unspoken the 12 step fellowship to which i belonged. i could diss my peers (which i have done many times), diss the rooms (ditto) and speak about all those awful taboo topics that some of my peers consider to be “outside issues.” the fact of the matter was i enjoyed the freedom to just be myself or to be someone else, depending upon my mood. this has become part of my recovery routine and i see it as letting the world read over my shoulder as i write a daily journal.
finally i arrive at honoring my spirit by staying clean today. for decades i did whatever i wanted or felt i need to do and the results were most of the time manipulated to come out the way i desired. there was no cost too high, to get what i wanted and when i came to recovery, i never believed that i would still be clean and living a program after twenty years. as i stay clean and allow the process of recovery to shape my will and my life i see that i am not all that different than i was when i walked into the rooms. i still have the desire to look better than i am doing. i still have the ability to blend into any crowd. i still have the means to manipulate those in my life to achieve whatever nefarious ends i have in mind. the difference today, is that i choose not to indulge in those behaviors and recovery continues to give me that choice. i honor the spirit that was barely flickering when i arrived in the rooms, by CHOOSING to live a program of recovery. i make choices today that allow me to be something more than i was before, not different, but certainly enhanced. if Madison Avenue was trying to market me, the slogan could certainly be the new and improved DON, available in the rooms of recovery, just for today!

∞ DT ∞