Outside Issue!

"Who am I to judge other people?  Have I proved by my great success in life that I know all the answers?  Exactly the opposite.  On the basis of my record, am I a fit person to be a judge of other people?  Hardly.  In A.A I have learned not to judge people.  I am so often wrong.  Let the results of what they do judge them.  It's not up to me."

"When I think of all who have gone before me, I realize that I am only one, not very important person.  What happens to me is not so very important after all.  As you look back over your life, it is not too difficult to believe that what you went through was for a purpose, to prepare you for some valuable work in life.  Everything in your life may well have been planned by God to make you of some use in the world."

It distresses me that my daily life has become so full of angry, confrontational, dismissive interactions.  I've found myself being swept up by this negative energy.  I'm finding stuff to criticize way too often.  This is a difficult time for many of us.  A therapist friend of mine said that her caseload exploded as the world has tried to come out of the pandemic so I know that I'm not the only one suffering from the angst of pandemic fatigue.

I've been stepping back a bit from my A.A. life.  I feel this defensiveness even seeping into The Rooms.  I've more or less let my current sponsor drift away and have begun to reconnect with a temporary sponsor who helped me during our transition from Portland to SoCal.  After a lull of a few weeks I called the real sponsor - a good man who I love a lot - and he shared this story: a new woman came to their meeting where the county mandate is roundly ignored and when she pointed this out was shouted down with the facile explanation of "outside issue!  outside issue!"  I'm not sure how obeying the law became an outside issue but there you go.

So much for taking care of the newcomer.