WEEKLY MEDITATION
Let us spend one day as deliberately as nature, and not be thrown off track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.
-Henry David Thoreau
Often the addicted life is one ruled by circumstances seemingly beyond our control. Even our inner world, our emotional world, is ultimately controlled by what is happening outside of it. This creates a reality that is influenced only by circumstance, a reality that has no room to be influenced by us. And this is where our addictions come in, as a powerful external means of regulation. In recovery, however, we must endeavor to find where it is we do have power, where we have the power to assert our influence and feel its effect. As today’s quotation suggests, we have the ability, should we learn to strengthen it, to allow ourselves not to be thrown off emotionally by what happens in life around us. If we nurture the ability to navigate our inner world, we no longer require the “benefits” of our addictions. While our addictions seem to influence our inner world in a positive way, they usually have a profoundly negative effect on the actual structure of our lives. They are only an attempt to bring a sense of calm and contentment, not an attempt to create lives that will naturally bring us toward the feelings of comfort and fulfillment we seek. Recovery, then, must be an attempt to gain access to the parts of ourselves where we shouldhave influence, our inner world, so that we are not thrown off by every occurrence that happens without our express permission. This to the end that, again, our lives will require less and less anesthetization.
