Blog entry for:

my thoughts and opinions, while others express their take on the world around us. coming to this topic today, i am amazed by the huge diversity of opinions and interpretations my peers and i share about a body of written literature that is based in one hundred and seven pages of text. ironically, the spiritual path that i have found myself on, has only slightly over one hundred pages of printed text, and yet probably has hundreds of thousands of pages about what those one hundred or so pages actually says. it seems the less that is written the more things are open for opinion. maybe that is human nature, to over-complicate and explain away the simple and direct. the fact is, how i see my path through recovery, does not match that of all of my peers, even locally and that is a GOOD thing. before i go further down the path of being respectful of my peers and their ideas, i need a bit of a digression:

Linda L.
CONGRATS on SIXTEEN (16) years of doing this recovery gig.
I am glad i got to see you come in, and stick around.

when i came to recovery, i was certain my opinions and notions were “supreme” and everyone else was in need of being “educated.” that attitude did not disappear overnight and for the first decade of my recovery,m it popped up more often that i would have liked it to. in fact, it was and still is one of my most annoying traits and one that taught me the value of STEPS SIX and SEVEN, as no matter how hard i tried, i could not rid myself of this tendency nor was i any good at suppressing it. the problem was, as i once saw it, is that i believed i had a more insightful and certainly more correct take on those 107 pages that is the core of my program of recovery. the problem today is, i know that is just one of those stories i have told myself often enough, that i have come to regard it as the “TRUTH.”
these days, i am much less apt to criticize or argue about what i believe those 107 pages say and i offer unsolicited advice, much less frequently. it is not as if i have no opinion or thoughts or buy into the party line, hook, line and sinker. no i CHOOSE to listen to what my peers have to say, because i may actually learn to see something in a new light. learning to listen and critically evaluate when they are done, is something i practice at and perhaps one day will be able to do without any effort. just for today, however, i am still a student of the technique of active listening and as such, have much to let go of and learn.

∞ DT ∞