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value judgements on my feelings and the events of each day, are bad? guess what, that is a value judgement, in and of itself. the whole point of the reading when taken to an extreme, flies in the face of human reality, and what it means to be a human. of course, i am going to make value judgements about my feelings, the events of the day, the people i meet, how i interact with the world around me and what may or may not be good or bad for me. to expect anything else, is just ludicrous.to expect myself not to act, based on those judgements is also expanding the realm of ridiculous. so with that i can walk away and head on down to work. or can i?!
part of using hyperbole, to take an idea to its extreme, is that in that process, the kernel of truth within it, gets washed out by the background noise. casting how i feel as good or bad, sets me up for seeking and avoidance behaviors, namely chasing those feelings that i deem as good, and avoiding those feelings that i deem as bad, not all that much different from life in active recovery. all of that implies that i have any power at all over how i feel in any instant of time. while i can try and program my feelings, that also feels like slipping back into behaviors that characterized my active addiction, and is not a place i choose to go today. beside, bad is just a term for feelings that are uncomfortable, at least in most of the cases i can think of in my life and experience. of course, what i am writing about only applies to me and no one else. feeling uncomfortable, is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when those feelings arise from actions and behaviors that are unhealthy for me. using my feelings as a guide to better living, does take some of the knee-jerk reaction out of my snap judgements. it also allows me a place to grow, as i experience all that life has to offer. which reminds me of a call i got last week. an addict complained of feeling isolated and alone, when i asked him questions that were open-ended and could allow him to talk a bit and lead into to conversation, he shut it down with a parody of the ideas expressed within this reading. he took the ideas presented here to the extreme, as people like me often do, and left himself no place to go. when asked about why he would do such a thing, he referred me to our literature. well if i want to be alive today, i need to take what comes, and regardless of whether or not i think it is good or bad, allow it to happen as it will and learn from it. and yes, i do not have good or bad feelings, but i certainly have pleasant and unpleasant ones, and there is not a one-on-one correlation between those set of terms, not all uncomfortable feelings, if any, are bad!
so time to head out and make my daily bread, which is a good thing , i think!

∞ DT ∞