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seems to be the root of what makes me most uncomfortable, when angst permeates my life. it would be so nice to say, that nothing ever gets under my skin. i have learned to tolerate, accept and let go of, everyone and everything in my life, in the here and now. yes, that would be nice to say, the reality is, that i have yet to achieve that Buddha-like state and am more apt to follow a corruption of Descartes famous line; “i resist, therefore i am!” the facts, plain and simple, is that i am hardly ever, one of those who lays down and accepts my fate, and that attitude pervades everything else, to the exclusion of knowing when and where to resist.
change is inevitable, as i tell the men who call me their sponsor, and if one is living a program of recovery, it will almost always be for the better. as soon as the words leave my mouth, i start to wonder if i truly believe them, or am i just playing one more hypercritical card, telling others what they SHOULD do and ignoring that same advice for myself. i know that the change manifest by living this program of recovery, is always part of a better path for me. i also know that as a rule, i choose to resist that change for as long as possible, wallowing a the swamp of self-pity and despair. there is a certain comfort, in al;lowing myself to play the victim. i GET to abdicate responsibility to something or someone else. i GET to live in blithe ignorance of what is going on inside of me and most importantly when something, as part of the process, occurs that i find undesirable, it is not my fault. the notion that i may be responsible for my recovery and my life, is one i reject through resisting the process of change in my life.
it is quite true, at least for me, that when the pain of not doing is greater than perceived pain of doing, i act. what i often find, however, is that i have very little control about either the pace or the nature of the change, and i have already had the change active in my life for a bit of time. my letting go of resistance is just the final formality. i have a very serious blind spot to what change i think is happening and has happened in my life. many times the culmination of a process occurs without me even noticing. a case in point, the removal of my desire to use, which should have been a major red letter day on my calendar. what happened instead, was that my life filled up, my six months of being on the “five minute plan” has change to the hour and finally just for today plan, and the bone-crushing, jaw clenching jones that i lived with was simply gone. until i was asked by a peer when that left me. one of the outcomes of the biggest changes in my life, had come and gone unnoticed. i did not even realize that the the desire to use, as manifest by my constant obsession to use, has been removed form my daily life,. of course, i still was working under the assumption, that once my judicial troubles were cleaned up, i would use again, and amazingly when that time came, i had changed even more. in fact, as that event approached, i realized that change from who i was, was a good thing and that i really did not want or need to go back to the life of using, just for today.
the upshot of all of this, is a realization that change is always going on in myself and the world around me. i can ignore that fact and resist its effects, or i can wake up, be present and stop resisting, just for today.

∞ DT ∞