I think this idea of impermanence is really something to grab onto. Nothing is going to be here forever; ergo, is anything real? I've heard that looking at the existence of a river can be helpful. Big, old river, always there, always right there in front of me, full of water, full of water flowing by so that from one instant to the next you're looking at an entirely new river, yet all you see is that big river, same as it always was. So what exactly am I looking at? The river? The water? What am I looking at? What is there?
"Where does this pain come from? It comes from your own inattention. You failed to look closely at life. You failed to observe the constantly shifting flow of the world as it went by. You set up the collection of mental constructions, 'me,' 'the book,' 'the building,' and you assumed that those were solid, real entities. You assumed that they would endure forever. they never do. But you can tune into the constant change. You can learn to perceive your life as an ever-flowing movement. You can learn to see the continuous flow of all conditioned things. You can learn this. It is just a matter of time and training." Henepola Gunaratana
Just: Only; simply.
Fucking word, just. All you have to do is work at it assiduously, forever. One of my bits of A.A. advice is to "trust the process." It works; many of us have stayed sober for years; so slog and trudge away. "Time takes time" is another good aphorism. When someone has finally gotten a tiny sliver of sobriety I often remind them that if you want to get 31 days you've got to get 30 days first. Every day is a little victory. Don't tell me you "just" have 30 days.
I have a dear, old, old friend who loves history and calls himself an archivist. He is the greatest collector and organizer of stuff that I've ever met. He has two storage lockers to keep his meticulously organized stuff in. Two! He has a condo and then two storage lockers full of stuff, some of it, to my way of thinking, bizarrely trivial. For the longest time I was critical of this behavior. Today, not so much, although my perception is that he spends an inordinate amount of time, both physical and emotional, maintaining that stuff. One of the greatest stress reductions I experienced in my life was moving from a big house to a small one and doing so over a long distance. It was easy to hang onto stuff when I could just chuck it into a corner of the basement or the rafters of a garage. It wasn't easy chucking all of these things but it was incredibly freeing. And I miss so little of it. Look, I get it - it's fun to pore over mementoes from high school or pictures that I've taken years ago but I don't hardly ever do it.
"Come and see." Gotama the Buddha
This dude did not think of his teachings as a set of dogmas but rather as a set of propositions for each individual to investigate for himself. Very A.A. in its simplicity. I tell people all the time that they can use the 12 Steps as explained in our Program to get sober or they can do something else. If it works, if you're sober and happy-ish, then huzzah for you. That's the goal. The goal is not to make someone do it the way we've done it. I tell people this: "What the fuck do I know? I'm a salesman, for chrissake, I don't know what you should do."
"Place no head above your own." Gotama the Buddha
Also very wise. Don't take my word for it. You figure it out. Read stuff, listen to stuff, talk to people, come to your own conclusions.
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