Blog entry for:

no matter who may be involved.
so practicing these principles in all my affairs and putting them before personalities are certainly linked. no matter how i try to slice or dice it, IF i want to implement this spiritual program in my daily life, i NEED to treat everyone, even those i do not trust or like, the same. i struggle with this, as the amount of love and respect i show my friends and family is naturally proportional to the amount of respect and love i feel for them. there are time where i feel i am called on to live the life of a saint, and that is when i realize that ideals, as nice as they are, are something to strive for and not beat myself down for not achieving them.
of course i am going to treat my friends and the peers i like and respect better than the general populace. owning that fact, does not mean i give up my effort to practice these principles in all my affairs. it means i set a base level of love, respect, tolerance and patience, with all of those i encounter in my day. that i can do, even for those with whom i have every little respect of love for and there are more than a couple of those people in my life each and every day.
does that throw me into the 90-10 version of my recovery program? i see that is a valid question, as now i have already excluded all sorts of people. is that truly practicing all these principles in all of my affairs? okay, a quick rationalization or justification may solve this problem, after all everyone else does it, why not me.however i find that i cannot lie to myself here, it takes a great effort to overcome my bias, my prejudice and my perceived notions of who owes me what and who has tromped upon me. that being said, i do understand that everyone is deserving of my respect, my patience and my courtesy, and that needs to be my baseline. from there. after all as one of my peers likes to say, practicing helps make it perfect.

∞ DT ∞