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self-acceptance with the serenity prayer is something that i never paused to even think about. this is one of those **DUH** moments for me, when i consider exactly what the words mean, instead of just brushing any deeper meaning under the carpet. yes, it is impossible to change my age, my height, my native intelligence or the fact that i am an addict. it is not impossible for me to change my financial status, my physical, mental and emotional fitness or my willingness to be more than i am today. unlike some of the people in my life, i am not content to use the fact that i may be limited in one respect or another, to prevent me from working towards overcoming those limitations, here and now, in real-time. one issue that rears its ugly head, time and again, is the fact i cannot reclaim the years i lost in active addiction. no matter how hard i try and live my life fully today, i still have the loss of twenty-five of the years of my youth in a smoke-filled haze of fantasy and denial. no matter how many times i tell myself that it is what it is, i still feel the pain of that loss. i cannot change that sad fact of my life, BUT what i can do, is accept it and move on.
looking at my life today, through the lens of the serenity prayer, i can see i am doing better than i think i am. if i were to use the number of men with whom i am actively working as a gauge of how i am doing recovery-wise, i could say there is nothing here that needs to be changed, after all they are trusting me to provide them the ways and means to continue to work a program of recovery. that is not, however a good measure of my spiritual fitness. once upon a time, i wore the number of men i sponsor like a badge of honor and saw it as some sort of status symbol more sponsees equals more of a spiritual guru. my spiritual status is not based on external measures such as that any more. in fact, i am quite certain that my spiritual fitness is better measured about how i treat those i encounter in my everyday life, going through the mundane tasks of living life in twenty-twenty-three. that result is evident when i sit, in the evening and go over my day to see what i need to accept, what i need to correct and what i need to revel in.
being at ease with how live in the here and now, certainly can be seen through the words and deeper meaning the serenity prayer. as i was telling one of the men i sponsor yesterday, the spiritual life need not be a binary sort of path, either this way or that. the ONLY binary concept in recovery, as i see it, is that i am either clean or i am not and if i have to rationalize, justify or look for loopholes between those two states of being,m than i am probably not clean, at all. i do, however, know that my willingness to get up from this exercise and get outside for an hour, to pound the pavement, means that just for today, i am changing the state of my health as i accept that i will not get any younger, no matter how many miles i put in today. 😉

∞ DT ∞