WEEKLY MEDITATION
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.
-Aldous Huxley
Through our addictions we seek comfort. Our addictions represent an attempt to tame our experience of life, to round out its edges until it no longer feels like a potential threat. The reality of the addicted life, however, profoundly misses this mark, usually creating the antithesis of what we were seeking to begin with. This is because life cannot be tamed. To attempt to do so is an affront to the basic gift that being alive truly is. Our recovery must be a process through which we teach ourselves to embrace the true nature of life. We must learn to roll with the punches, ride the waves, and, yes, even walk the rough edges, sometimes. Although it is also important to create a reliable structure that supports proper functioning and conscious direction in our life, we can’t use this structure as an attempt to avoid its ultimately wild and unpredictable nature. But the good news is that the unpredictability is where the sweet stuff is. And if we can learn to fully embrace life, even with all of its inevitable vicissitudes, the need to seek comfort through the mechanics of addiction dissolves on its own.
