Good stuff Jen
Quote:
|
The chief activator of our defects has been self-centerred fear -- primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed or would fail to get something we demanded. Living upon a basis of unsatisfied demands, we were in a state of continual disturbance and frustration. Therefore, no peace was to be had unless we could find a means of reducing these demands.
|
I am thinking this morning that my real unsatisfied demand, my real fear, was that life was passing me by and that there was something pretty basic that I was missing. Other people I knew, some with more material things and some with less, just seemed to know something I didn't and I could never figure out what the heck it was. For me, that something turned out to be serenity. I never had it. There was the false serenity that came from the bottle but that only lasted as long as I was drunk and it wasn't even serenity, it was not caring.
I'm also thinking that a large external source of my unsatisfied demands is our culture's relentless focus on "What's new?" instead of "What's good?" and my willingness to play along with that game. As long as I allowed myself to be distracted by the latest shiny toy, the latest fad, the latest crisis, the latest weather, the latest whatever, I could temporarily ignore the hollowness I felt inside. But that hollowness never went away, it was just drowned out by the noise and when things got quiet, usually when I was alone, the size of that emptiness was overwhelming. So I tried to fill it with alcohol and in the end I ran out of hours in the day to drink and the emptiness only got bigger.
I just don't feel that way today. The steps and all the other things that I have been doing to stay sober have filled in that emptiness in a way that alcohol never could.
One Love, One Heart,
Tony