Buddha, Jesus, and Gandhi - They All Agree!

I suggest that today you just let it rip.  Go for it.  Try something new.  Go someplace you've never been.  Order the haggis.  Things probably aren't going to work out the way you think they're going to, anyway.  All your planning will be for naught.  You're going to get old and decrepit and die and I say that with a great deal of cheerfulness and optimism.

"While alcoholics keep strictly away from drink, they react to life much like other people.  But the first drink sets the terrible cycle in motion.  Alcoholics usually have no idea why they take the first drink.  Some drinkers have excuses with which they are satisfied, but in their hearts they really do not know why they do it.  The truth is that at some point in their drinking they have passed into a state where the most powerful desire to stop drinking is of no avail."

I have an anniversary coming up next week - or Birthday as the Left Coasters  call it.  34 years.  I think of gratitude when another year rolls around and not because I'm actually grateful, necessarily, but because I've been taught that if I practice being grateful, that if I at least pretend, then actual gratitude follows.  I like the idea that our recovery follows this path: actions, speech, thinking, spirituality.  When I was getting sober I was tasked with making a Gratitude List each night.  I was not grateful, actually, for most of the stuff I wrote down but the repeated action of noting them, in writing, with pen and ink on paper, seeing them there in front of me, in black and white, every day, started the process of feeling grateful.  Then I started to talk about gratitude and ditto the insincerity but - again - the repetition brought the feelings to life.  Now, today, I find my mind quickly readjusts when I'm not happy about something.  I can almost hear the gears clanking into action - "I hate that guy" - whirr, clunk, clink - "boy, is my life good."

An off-repeated mantra of mine follows.  Feel free to do something else.  I believe that most people tend towards ingratitude.  Alcoholics, of course, take this tendency to the nth degree and - frankly - with some justification because our diligent and sustained efforts to fuck everything up have added a lot more items to the Problems category than to the Blessings one.  Life is tough and scary.   I understand that we're more likely to worry about our health or the safety of our kids or that bill coming due in the morning than to ponder the delicate beauty of a blooming rose.  I get it.  Makes sense.

"What you think you become."  Buddha

"As you think, so you are."  Proverbs 23:7.

Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.  Gandhi.