Daily Reprieve

From Courage to Change of May 26:

“Anything worth doing,” goes a slightly cockeyed version of the old saying “is worth doing badly.” Perfectionism, procrastination, and paralysis are three of the worst effects of alcoholism upon my life.

I have a tendency to spend my life waiting for the past to change. I want to spend the first hundred years of my life getting all the kinks ironed out and the next hundred years actually living. Such an inclination to avoid taking risks, to avoid doing anything badly, has prevented me from doing some of the things I enjoy the most, and it has kept me from the regular practice that produces progress.

If I’m unwilling to perform a task badly, I can’t expect to make progress toward learning to do it well. The only task that I can pretend to perform perfectly is the one that I have left entirely undone.

Today’s Reminder

Al-Anon encourages me to take risks and to think of life not as a command performance but as a continuing series of experiments from which I learn more about living.

“All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.”

~ James Russell Lowell

END OF QUOTE—————————————

Living a life dancing around emotional tripwires has definitely led to the second-guessing of my intent of will. And yet, doesn’t the Twelve Step program show us the importance of evaluating our motives? How do I separate these two similar roads that lead to very different lives?

For me, I have to slow down and move away from living (or not living) life on impulse. It can be impulsive to withdraw or to immediately apologize for something my broken guilt-o-meter misidentifies as wrong. The plan is everything for me. There are specific times and places to look back over my day, a day that I took the courage to live. I find the correct ways to use my will as identified in the program, moving slow enough to make my mind more effective. Over time, I can make on the spot corrections based on habitual, planned, self-evaluations. But in the beginning, I need to be free to make on the spot errors to learn. I cannot grow into life with an atrophied soul.

This entry was posted on October 18, 2023 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Courage to Change, Journal, Life, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.