What's Best for Me

I'm convinced that the idea of "I'm responsible for the locomotion and God is responsible for the outcome" is one of the pillars of my sobriety.  My sanity.  It reminds me that I need to start walking down the road, even when I'm not sure if I'm on the road that's going to get me someplace I want to be.  The picking a road - a decent, good road to the best of my limited human ability - and to take off trudging.  I'm too worried about picking the right road and by right road I mean the road that's going to get me what I want.  I'm not too big on learning wisdom by enduring hardships.  Fuck that.  I want a steady climb to more riches, more sex, more power.

At the end of my drinking/drugging I was living in Indianapolis, working for a home health company as the operations manager of a decent sized branch.  I had been with this company about three years, been promoted twice, and was on a fast track to a position with some real authority.  Typical of a hard-charging, hard-working alcoholic.  I was also at that point in my drinking/drugging - for the second time, slow learner that I am - where the alcohol was overwhelming my ability to function professionally so I was burning bridges left and right and then dynamiting the smoldering ruins, and I perceived correctly that my time with the company was fast drawing to an ugly close, so I started interiewing wherever I could, mostly with companies that did similar work.  Today it's clear that wanting to take a position for a job that I didn't like, didn't perform particularly well, and had no education or formal training to recommend me for the work .  . . well, the irony is crystal clear, as is the idiocy of my thinking.  Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.  Honestly, if I had worked as hard to perform the functions of my current job as I did looking for a new one I would have been fine.

Alas, no one wanted me so I was forced into a job internally that was several rungs below my last position on the responsibility curve, and this was foisted upon me in a very public and very humiliating fashion.  What happened?  I moved to Chicago where the A.A. was particularly suited to my personality and where I met SuperK, the woman who has now been with me for 35 years, for some reason opaque to me and everyone who knows us.  I also made a lateral switch into the field of sales, after taking some night courses in the craft at a local community college, but only after ignoring the advice of people over the years who told me repeatedly that my personality was a good fit for that kind of work, and my career growth was explosive.

The point is, of course, that I tried to get what I wanted; didn't get it, to my dismay; and that everything worked out just fine.

"In these times of Instant Everything our patience wears thin when we have to wait.  We can wait wisely - seeing that, sometimes, delays sSave us from a problem we could have met.  How long has it been since we have had such a good excuse to just sit quietly and watch others trying to beat the clock."