Blog entry for:

i cease to see them as potential friends and fellow travelers on the road to recovery. so here i sit after a bit of work and moving around the gift of water that fell on my property with a shovel, thinking about one of my character defects, being judgmental. i understand that being human and surviving in the world means having to make judgments. sometimes i have to make them quickly in order to survive. i have come to accept that my addiction takes this particular human need to the extreme and warps it out of shape. after all, the population i dealt with and the necessity i felt to keep my using undercover created a situation that making snap judgments was a survival skill. after all, one does not use for twenty-five or twenty-six years, without a survival skill set. that being said, life in recovery means that i need to let go of this part of my past and allow the process to happen. not that i need to stop making judgments, but i need to stop the process before the stereotyping and pigeonholing begins. living in recovery, at least for me, means that i may not have the power to remove my defects or shortcomings, but i do have the power to choose to exercise a spiritual principle when given the opportunity. so what is the spiritual opposite of stereotyping? well i think that this morning, it would be open-mindedness. how can i exercise my power in these situations? well to start with, accept that i make judgments, then through that acceptance, open my mind to the possibilities that what i perceive is not the reality of the situation, and allow new evidence to accumulate based on observed reality rather than on stereotypical filters that are moire than a bit subjective. when i able to accomplish this, i find i am a whole lot more comfortable and seem to practice more than a bit more integrity in my life.
on that note of HOPE, i think i will get back to my task at hand, which is creating something new and different, it is after all a good day to practice the principle of responsibility.

∞ DT ∞