Idealist: A person who is guided more by ideals than practical considerations.
Idealism: The practice of pursuing ideals, especially unrealistically.
This is a great fragment of a great passage from The Big Book. This was me. Shooting for the stars while not taking care of the mundane aspects of living. Wanting to bring peace and serenity to all of mankind while cutting someone off on the highway or ignoring the young person making my coffee. Idealism is great. I still shoot for the stars but I don't forget to take a shower at the end of the day.
"It's none of our business about your drinking. We're not up here trying to take any of your rights or privileges away from you. Now, if you don't want it, we'll not take up your time, and we'll be going and looking for someone else."
One of the greatest realizations for me in my A.A. recovery life is that nobody has an agenda as far as I'm concerned. Nobody is telling me what to do. Nobody is criticizing me. People tell me how they behave and I can decide all by myself how I want to behave. I relaxed almost immediately when I found out that I get to do what I want as long as it doesn't affect anyone else negatively. I was free to find my own path.
A few hundred pages into one of the spiritual books I'm reading - a hundred pages of detailed, in-depth instructions and suggestions about how to enlarge one's life using meditation and centering techniques - I came upon a chapter discussing the value of psychotherapy, how valuable it came be, how necessary it is for a lot of us, how important it can be to have a trained medical professional help us clear up some of the wreckage of our past. There's a sentence or two somewhere in the literature about the fact that professionals - medical, religious, social - can be of tremendous help. Some of us have suffered in the past from circumstances out of our control that require more help than prayer and meditation can offer. I always tell new people that if you fall down and break your arm you really should go to the hospital instead of finding an A.A. meeting and working on your acceptance skills. First things first. I need to be reminded from time to time that A.A. can't solve all my challenges nor does it want to or suggest that it can.
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