I think all we really need to do is not use and find the right support to maintain that Jake.
That should leave a lot of time for the other stuff in life :)

D

JakeC, it sounds like you are doing great, and balance in all things is what we need for our mental health. Doing the things that non-drinkers do (including not drinking of course) is what is working for me.

Thanks JakeC: The canoe analogy seems to have some possibilities. Once a bunch of us kids went on a canoe trip starting in Ely Minnesota and going way up into the Canadian (Quetico) Provincial park. We were away for two weeks. Two of our campers (not I) went over a fall in their canoe (considering themselves experts in "whitewater"). This soaked most of the food, which then had to be dried out. We went without a guide. And we all got back alive. In those days there were no cellphones so if we got in trouble we would have been pretty much on our own. And there were days when we saw no living soul. Were we foolish in not having a guide?
I think the whole experience could be viewed as a metaphor for recovery from alcoholism. Some folks have done it without a guide. But when Dante took a tour of hell he had a guide along, just in case. Same thing goes for purgatory.

W.

I just wanted to be happy and at ease... That is what drove me so hard in early recovery. I knew it could be done. I saw it at my home group, people there that were truly happy, joyous and free. I wanted some of that.

A lot of my intellectualization served, ultimately, to distract me. Trying soooooo hard to understand it, to make sense of it all. I argued and BS'd my way through so much of this recovery stuff. Until I decide none of it made sense enough to me to help me feel the way I wanted to.

So I did what they did, and I even tried to complicated that, LOL.

If you are interested in AA, a sponsor will help you keep it simple.

Very much so. It is a big trap for us. We get stuck there and just get bogged down.

Make no mistake, I believe strongly in the intellectual side of recovery. I can draw a line from Plato to the third step of AA but unless I follow those thoughts with action it is all straw.