Still thinkin'

So I guess we can consider the blog reactivated, yes? Why no posts in so long? Life has been very full.  Between the stresses of work, my service in the program, my work with sponsees, hangtime with friends, my music endeavors, and making sure to take time to care for myself . . . well, you get the picture.

This is not to say that I’ve stopping thinking about the Disease. How can I not?  Aside from the work I do to stay strong in my own Recovery, I’m still surrounded by the Disease in my everyday life. These days, it’s the behaviors which are so part and parcel of our spiritual malady that are my main challenges. Not in myself so much (thank god), but in others.

First and foremost, though, I have to own up to my own shit, which means remembering that, yeah, it’s totally true that the program teaches us not to take others’ inventory. And I need to remember, too, that the things we see in others that we don’t like are all-too-often the characteristics we don’t like about ourselves. 

So having said that, I guess all that I’m about to write about could just as easily be viewed as insight into the character defects of my own that I work on and try to change and not practice any longer. Who knows? Maybe the very fact that I work so hard not to practice these things is one of the reasons they bother me so much in others. Or maybe I just continue to have crazy fucked up people in my life, like everyone else.

Regardless, I've been needing to write on some themes of the Disease that I have been thinking about lately, the first being...

Finger pointing

How many of us are familiar with the thinking that it’s always someone else’s fault? I can’t tell you how many times and for how many years I blamed the rest of the world for everything that was wrong in my life. It was always something someone else had done to me, some external reason for why I was miserable and my life a disaster. It was never my fault—are you kidding? I was the victim! It was all about what was done TO me. I was convinced that the Fates were at war with me—personally. 

I look back on that thinking and shake my head at how self-centered it is. Being (mostly) on the other side of that now, and understanding that type thinking, what it is and where it comes from, is interesting to say the least. I can see it in myself when it happens now, and I can recognize it in others, too. That’s both a blessing and a curse, because even though I might think I know what’s really going on with someone else—that they made a mistake and don’t want to admit it, or are covering up for some greater incompetence, or just flat-out don’t want to take responsibility for themselves—it’s not my job to shake my finger at them. In fact, my job is to do the exact opposite, to avoid taking others’ inventory and try to not be judgmental.

My friends in the program are people I depend on to call me on my bullshit, and vice-versa. We have an understanding about what it means to work the program, to try and correct our mistakes and change the way we live, and we need each other’s help to do it. Outside the rooms, our job is to let go and let others live their own lives their own way. We can take responsibility for what we’ve done wrong, the times we’ve slacked off in our own responsibilities, but we can’t make others do the same.