Ah, that's what I love about this new way of life that y'all are helping me live. Y'all have help me to swing through the high wire gamut of emotions with the help of a spiritual safety net. Since that grace-filled day in '61 I've been lifted to life's mountain top and then dropped into hellish bottomless moments; neither has killed me. I've come to believe through experience what I was told early on. "What doesn't kill me will only make me stronger."
My life now is a life in full color. The necessary splats of dark and the light mixed together by the master- mixer to produce, in His good time, a harmonious pattern. Neither labeled good nor bad. Both have been essential to form a dynamic tension. A tension necessary for my growth. I have to admit it's better than a "two-by-four" up the side of the head.
Sometimes in the tension's pain I've been heard to lash out and snarl "enough already, back off, I don't want to grow anymore." Its at times like this that I hear your "nagging but loving" voices chime in with, "Hey Jimbo, serenity and peace is not the absent of conflict but the ability to cope with it." In other words, live with it and learn from it.
I write this as we come off turkey day. As the our children and grand children, now parents gathered the conversation ebbed and flowed on family, health, new adventures started, old completed and the new antics of the under nine great grand children.
The subjects ranged from tearful laughter to tearful grief. It was wonderful as we all felt that peace and happiness that surpasses all understanding. Over the years we have been akin to a family that has suffered shipwreck and the pain of the survival process together.
Our gifts today are that we are all healthy, together and can share equally in the gift of sobriety, not to mention the love and playfulness of our children and our grandchildren.
JF
Playing with Anxiety
8 months ago
i'd have to look long and far to find better gifts of gratitude than those you have mentioned here...
ReplyDeleteI really related to the statement, "I've been lifted to life's mountain top and then dropped into hellish bottomless moments." It's been true for me too.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first got sober, I heard someone say that once someone gets sober, they will begin feeling better.... For some years I thought that person was a LIAR! There were times, especially in my first year or two, when I felt worse than I'd ever felt before.
Then one day I realized that what they had said was absolutely correct: I'd just heard them wrong. I'd mistakenly heard them to say that once we got sober, we'd feel "better" feelings: like joy, happiness, serenity, etc. And by the wonders of logic applied to false "facts" I also assumed that they were saying that we'd also feel less of the "bad" feelings, like anger, depression, saddness, etc.
What I realized at some point though is that we do start feeling better in the sense that we begin feeling ALL of the feelings available to humanity and we begin to feel them in all their richness and depth. "Better" wasn't referring to the feelings themselves, but the relative quality of my being able to feel all of those feelings.
When I was drunk, I ran from feelings and as a result, I was rather numb as to feelings. At the end, there weren't many feelings at all: other than fear, saddness, loneliness and anger. Those weren't bad feelings: they were unwanted feelings. They were, in retrospect, tremendously good/beneficial feelings because each of them led me to that moment in time where I gave up the fight to not be an alcoholic and to accept the truth about who I was: an alcoholic.
Now I've developed a whole new dictionary full of feelings and am gradually beginning to see the importance of all of them.
The energy required to group feelings into "good" and "bad" holds less and less value to me.
So, strange as it seems, I am feeling better!
Take care!
Mike L.