WEEKLY MEDITATION
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their mind to be.
-Abraham Lincoln
Today’s quotation is about choice. The addicted life is one with very little choice—the deeper the addiction, the more elusive the ability to make choices. The patterns of active addiction are the antithesis of the patterns that lead to the ability to participate in active choice. With the inability to make these choices come inevitable feelings of futility and suffocation, again, feelings that will require more and more of the addictive behaviors with which to deal with this inability. Today’s quotation also suggests that we have the power to make decisions regarding our happiness, that we are not simply destined to experience the amount of happiness that we feel naturally. The problem is that as with many decisions, the decision to be happier comes with the responsibility of figuring out how this is to be. For the addict, the first thing is to deal with the addiction. But this is only a beginning because we are still left with the parts of ourselves that required the addiction in the first place. This is why recovery is a process. It is a process of figuring out what needs to be done in order to become happy, or what needs to be changed or discarded in order to find happiness. Either way, happiness is an active process that begins with a decision to become happier, and inherently, a commitment to discovering the path that will lead us to it.
