WEEKLY MEDITATION
Hard choices, easy life; Easy choices, hard life.
-Jerzy Gregorek
A life spent locked within active addiction patterns is very hard. Much time and energy of all sorts must be spent on acquiring and using that to which we are addicted and this often leaves little or no time for much else. This is partly because even though the addicted life can be hard, giving into our addictions is, at that point, the emotionally easy thing to do. To recover from our addictions is the opposite. The emotional decisions necessary to bring about the shift from addiction to recovery are very difficult, while the resulting life is much easier than our addicted one. Luckily, recovery, which should never be defined simply by a state of abstinence, should eventually answer the call sent from within our psyches, signaling the unmet emotional needs that we have attempted to meet through our addictive pursuits. But there is no way around the fact that at the beginning, it is a very difficult path that must be discovered and traveled—the difficulty always proportional to level of emotional attachment to our addictions. But if that initial stage can be faced and overcome, it is not long before life becomes so much easier that it motivates us to continue along that path of recovery, even when we have to make emotionally hard choices to stay on course.
