Daily Reprieve

From Courage to Change of Oct 20:

As a child, I would get down on my hands and knees for the longest time, just to watch a caterpillar crawl around. It never seemed to go very far, yet I patiently waited just in case it should do something spectacular. It never did, but I didn’t mind, because simply watching this peculiar-looking creature gave me pleasure.

Remembering this makes me question how many such precious moments are passing me by unnoticed because I am so focused on other things. Before Al-Anon, I spent years ignoring life’s beauty because I was too busy trying to get all the alcoholics to stop drinking, and in recovery I’ve lost many, many hours waiting to solve a problem or be freed of a character defect. Today I am learning to make room in my life for the wonders life has to offer.

Today’s Reminder

I am learning to choose where to focus my attention. Appreciating life’s simple gifts may take some practice, but as I become more aware of the beauty that is all around me, it gets easier to appreciate the beauty within.

“Just for today I will be unafraid. Especially, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful…” ~ Just for Today

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Unfortunately, part of living sometimes digresses into a battle of egos, both inside and outside my cranial cocoon. The idea of becoming “childlike” is a way of reframing life through the lens of innocence, humility, and trust. To become as a child isn’t to regress into naivety but to return to a state of openhearted presence. When I stop striving to control outcomes and instead kneel down, paying attention to what is, I can discover a new way of seeing. The childlike gaze turns ordinary moments — a crawling caterpillar, a morning cup of coffee, a shared laugh — into portals of divine reality.

In recovery, we begin to reclaim that posture. The compulsive urgency that once drove us — to fix, to solve, to control — slowly gives way to attentive curiosity. The world hasn’t changed so much as our gaze has softened. We start noticing that grace doesn’t always arrive as fireworks; sometimes it crawls, unhurried, across a leaf.

Where do I choose to place my attention? To focus on others’ drinking or my own defects is to live in reaction. To turn toward beauty is to live in response. That shift — from reacting to responding — marks a quiet revolution of the soul. The caterpillar becomes the teacher of patient transformation, the reminder that life unfolds on its own timetable, not ours.

I have permission to inhabit peace without guilt, to rest in awe without needing to earn it. In such moments, we rediscover our own metamorphosis: the frightened controller slowly becoming the gentle witness, wings not yet visible but forming all the same.

This entry was posted on October 23, 2025 at 9:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Courage to Change, faith, Journal, Life, love, mental-health, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality, writing. 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.