Me. At the Center of the Universe.

 Easy Does It.

"Alcoholics always do everything to excess.  They drink too much.  They have too many resentments.  They hurt themselves physically and mentally by too much of everything.  So when they come into A.A. they have to learn to take it easy.

Take it easy?  Take it easy?  Tell me more about this concept, oh, master.

A.A. teaches us to take it easy.  We learn how to relax and to stop worrying abut the past or the future, to give up our resentments and hates and tempers, to stop being critical of people, and to try to help them instead.  So in the time that's left to me to live , I'm going to try to take it easy, to relax and not to worry, to try to be helpful to others and to trust God."

This is some wild shit.

"I must overcome myself before I can truly forgive other people for injuries done to me.  The very thought of wrongs means that my self is in the foreground.  Since the self cannot forgive, I must overcome my selfishness.  I must cease trying to forgive those who fretted or wronged me.  It is a mistake for me even to think about these injuries.  I must aim at overcoming myself in my daily life and then I will find there is nothing in me that remembers injury, because the only thing injured, my selfishness, is gone."

Sometimes the stuff in the Hazelden "Twenty Four Hours a Day" book gets a little too religious for me.  But then again I'm usually looking for things to object to so when I chill out and lay back I learn to see all of it from a different perspective.  I don't have a totally clear understanding of this metaphysical paragraph but I get the jist of it - I'm so worried about myself that I place everyone in the world into a category with me at the center.  It just isn't about me.  If I think you hurt me somehow then I'm looking at the situation from my perspective.  

I ask that I may hold no resentments.  I pray that my mind may be washed clean of all past hates and fears.