Blog entry for:

the more i concentrate on the positive qualities in others, the more i will notice them in myself.
for the first time in ninety days i actually have a very positive outlook on life this morning. not that i was wallowing in misery and despair, but there was something off in my life. what may that be, i hear you thinking. well i have been struggling with the whole concept of meeting attendance and my life. lately, well over the past six months i have been finding meetings to be dull, boring and without anything to offer me, and have cut back on my meeting attendance as a result. of course i did some of the stuff i need to do. i shut-off the eternal, internal dialog that runs through my head when i am just sitting there trying to listen. that did not help, in fact once i started to actually listen to what was being shared i got angry because most of the stuff that was out there was whining or gloating and very little about how they stayed clean today. QUITE A JUDGMENT! so active listening made things worse for me, so like the good addict i am, i went and whined to my sponsor about it. what i wanted was some pearl of wisdom that would slap my silly head around and provide the fix to my dilemma. what i got was an assignment, one that sounded reasonable and one that i promptly forgot about for ninety days. typical behavior for me, if i do not get what i think i need, i tend to dismiss it!
so all this time i am forcing myself to attend meetings, no matter how loathsome i find them and getting closer and closer to the point where not going to any meetings sounded like an excellent idea. two weeks ago, i finally remembered my assignment, attend some different meetings with an open mind and see what i find there. well the first meeting that i went to outside of my normal little circle was one that i went to regularly when i first got clean, and i did not get any hope there either, in fact i left that meeting more pissed-off than ever. then i spoke at a meeting way down south and hung with the addicts at coffee afterwards and there i felt something start to shift. of course i was the main event and i got exactly the kind of sharing i needed. quite understandable and explainable, after all this is a disease of self-obsession. last week i tried to go to another meeting and my car died, of course i took that as a sign from the cosmos that it was time to stop this silliness and just grin and bear it. but i refused to give up. i do not want to be one those addicts who after some time clean disappear from the rooms, so i went to the same meeting i tried to go to a week ago, and i shared openly about my dilemma and was given exactly what i needed. does that mean that this is the meeting for me? perhaps. what i see it as, is that i have finally found a way to look at meetings in a positive light again and stop my stereotyping and judging about meetings and what i find there, at least for today.
so what does this ramble have to do with stopping the snap judgments and looking at people in a more positive sense? well i leave that up to you to figure it out, be assured that today i am more confident that no matter what meetings i attend i will be able to walk away from them with a different perspective than i have had recently. life is far to precious for me to allow the part of me i call my disease to separate me from the pack, so if i have to drive forty-five minutes each way every monday night to keep my perspective, so be it! recovery is more important to me that the time and gas it takes for me to GET what i need!
today what i need is yet another day clean and i can accept that right here and right now!

∞ DT ∞