Fightin' and Strugglin'

Fight: To try to overpower; to fiercely counteract.
Struggle: Strife; contention; great effort.

"When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you'd like them to be."  Leo Tolstoy

I need to love people for who they are and not for who I want them to be. 

This is another one of those sayings that I need to keep saying because if I forget to say it I find myself wondering how to change other people to fit my standards.  Never a good idea.  Not a good working idea.  Does not work, despite my diligent efforts.

I have been pondering my irritation with the sub-group of my regular group who really, really don't like how the world is playing out right now.  Again, I say: I understand this.  There are a lot of frustrating, restrictive, poorly understood things going on.  

Well, welcome to life.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change.

There is a lot of tension in this short sentence.  It implies that I should/can/might want to change things that I do not like while implying that I need to chill the hell out when I find this isn't possible and, boy, is it not possible a lot of the time.  I'm sorry to see so many good, solid AAs so frustrated with the state of the world right now that they're allowing this frustration to leak out into meetings.  I've got a lot of friends - like the young man quoted above - with whom I disagree on matters political, religious, social, and moral but with whom I get along with fine because we leave this crap out of our recovery circle.

"Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy."  Tradition Ten Alcoholics Anonymous

Normal:  Ordinary or usual; the same as would be expected.

I know I'm flogging this definition to death but it has some extra-special serious meaning for me right now.  Sometimes an ordinary, regular thing that is always the same isn't the best situation.  Slavery used to be normal, for chrissake, but no one thinks we should go back to that state of affairs.  Sometimes changing things mean the changed things get better.