Take A Chance

 Ask someone this question: "What is the biggest chance you've ever taken?"  Pay attention to the look on their faces as they ponder the question.  People begin to realize what safe lives they have chosen to lead.  The ways that people test themselves - contact sports, backpacking through Asia, military service - are foreign to most.  Something is lost in our obsessive concern with safety and security - some spirit of adventure.  Life is a gamble in which we don't get to deal the cards, but are nevertheless obligated to play them to the best of our ability.

Control is a popular illusion closely related to the pursuit of perfection.  We all know people who are perfectionistic.  They tend to be demanding of themselves and those around them and to manifest an obsessive orderliness that is, in the end, alienating.  They do not trust feelings and prefer to occupy themselves with things that they can count.  Our capitalist system is founded on competition; our legal system thrives on conflict and the pursuit of self-interest.

When I was about four months sober the company I was working for - or rather employed by because I wasn't getting too much accomplished in the work arena - asked me to move to Chicago.  I did not want to do this so I devoted a huge amount of time and effort to finding another job in Indianapolis, an amount so large that I would have been promoted if I had devoted as much time to working as to whatever it was that I was doing.  Honestly, I believe today that they expected me to just quit but I was too dense to see that.  I bitched and bitched and bitched until my sponsor finally said, exasperated: "If you don't like it you can just move back."

Huh.  In Chicago I met SuperK, got heavily involved with some real doctrinaire A.A., and finally segued into the world of industrial sales, a world tailored to my talents and interests.  I simply wouldn't have done this if I had stayed put.  It was painful and traumatic making the move but it was in my best interest.  Not what I wanted but what I needed.