"We who have accepted the A.A. principles have been faced with the necessity for a thorough housecleaning. We must face and be rid of the things in ourselves which have been blocking us. We therefore take a personal inventory. We take stock honestly. We search out the flaws in our make-up which caused our failure. When we see our faults we list them. We place them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and we were willing to set these matters straight. We reviewed our fears thoroughly."
Somewhere in the literature there's a suggestion that in our daily meditation we ask that our thoughts be directed away from self-pity and dishonest or self-seeking motives. Shit fire. Those are my three biggest areas of specialization. I'm intrigued by the fact that a lot of the time when I'm lying and self-seeking and feeling sorry for myself I don't even know I'm doing it. We try in Alcoholics Anonymous to avoid these behaviors - behaviors that are so ingrained in our personalities that when we try to root them out and avoid them they adapt and transmogrify into subtler, more devious iterations of the defect. When I got sober I worked on stopping the obvious lying that I was doing. That made sense. But repeatedly I found myself telling old stories and anecdotes that I wasn't sure had even happened. "Did I really do that?" I'd think. The human brain does a great job of taking memories and altering them to fit our current impression of ourselves. If you work hard at being kind to everyone but engaged in some bullying or gossip when you were drinking your brain may very well take this memory - one that is in opposition to how you see yourself today - and change it so you don't have to consider this bad behavior. I suppose this is some kind of coping mechanism. Sometimes a public figure will get caught telling a falsehood about something in their past and our immediate reaction is to shriek: "Liar!" Maybe so - there are a ton of liars out there, especially people in the public eye - but maybe they're embarrassed at this past behavior and their brain has obliterated the memory. This knowledge doesn't fit their current impression of themselves. The brain fills in a lot of blanks. It smooths things out. Life is hard enough without having to recall bad behavior over and over.
Euphoric recall, indeed.
The point here - if there is indeed a point - is that our inventory needs to be thorough. It needs to be ruthless. It needs to be undertaken with an attention to detail that we could not have imagined previously; indeed, were incapable of undertaking. We need to look beyond the hurt in any situation, especially when we've been hurt by a person, place, or thing, and find our part in the upset. It's there if we're thorough and honest. And it's the only part that we have any control over.
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