Statue of Limitations

"Parents teach only what they know to teach.  But we are not set forever in one direction.  We reach an age when we must teach ourselves.  We learn to forgive and to understand that when we get to the fork in the road we'll know the right way.  If our self-esteem has been damaged, feeding it more pity and more ill-treatment is not healing it."

The statute of limitations on blaming your parents for anything is 30.  I will admit that at one point I thought the phrase was "statue of limitations."  Like there's a statue somewhere of a mythological being called Limitations.  There are statues of Beauty and Wisdom and Youth so I just figured somewhere someone thought Limitations needed its own statue.  Not sure what it would look like.  Maybe it would half-finished.

"Remember that when you do anything, there will be someone that will find fault, no matter what you do.  The pleasure of an unhappy person is to find something wrong in others to salve his own discontent.  We all try to understand our differences of opinion, to care what effect we cause in other people.  But the bane of anyone's existence is ignorance of our own faults.  So what we find wrong in others may be a reflection of our own wrongs."

I was asked to lead the meeting this morning so I read from Step Eleven in the 12&12: "There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation, and prayer.  Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit.  But when they are logically related and interwoven, the result is an unshakable foundation for life."  I believe that prayer - talking, basically, a talent at which most alcoholics excel - is developed early in our recovery and that we're hammered into submission by sponsors and old-timers to quit looking for solutions to our problems outside of our own selves and to relentlessly, relentlessly examine our insides to see how we can improve ourselves.  After all, the outside world is just fine and none of our business - the inside world is where we need to focus.  

Meditation is a little trickier.  We want to know exactly how to do it and how to measure our progress.  We want to be excellent meditators and we want to get it over with.  It's not a Fourth Step.  It's not an amend.  It's not competitive meditation.  It's a part of Step Eleven - one of the three maintenance Steps - which can be started immediately and should be started immediately.  Here's the Book again: "Meditation is something that can always be further developed.  It has no boundaries, either of width or height.  Aided by such instruction and example as we can find, it is essentially an individual adventure, something which each one of us works out in his own way."  There's a lot of slop room there.  We can also get better at it as time passes and we practice continually.  It's an individual exercise that has no right or wrong way.  And - I love how Alcoholics Anonymous repeatedly reminds us to tap into help outside of The Rooms - we're encouraged to use whatever resources we can uncover.