Invested in life

I had coffee yesterday with a friend in recovery. He told me that he had a difficult conversation with his partner on Sunday, but that on Monday he felt better and has been feeling good all week. I think that's a parable of recovery.

Recovery involves courage and hard work today. It's not something to put off for tomorrow. Courage is nothing more than doing the thing that your fear tells you not to do. Every Step of recovery is an assault on your fear. And every assault on your fear is a step in recovery, no matter if it involves making amends to your wife or merely thanking God for another day of life.

The upside is that I think my life today is the product of what I did yesterday. My recovery work puts a deposit in my bank that I enjoy tomorrow. Much of the benefit of recovery is seen down the road. When you're in the mindset of tomorrow, you start to listen more to God, because when you're invested, you want to make sure your effort goes towards something of real value.

Unfortunately, I'm not set up to think and act like that. I'm an addict and my addiction is all about feeling good RIGHT NOW. My life in addiction was a string of "live for the moment" days that really didn't add up to much. And each day I'd wake a little less happy with myself and a little more sure that I didn't have what it took to get better.

Whatever good things might come into my life would be quickly consumed. I was always living just on what was available right at that moment. Worse, I "sold off" whatever credit I had in good will with everyone I knew: burning my furniture for heat until I didn't have a chair to sit on.

Things have taken a different turn in recovery.

I woke up this morning feeling okay about being me. I didn't feel that way because I'm suddenly a good person now. I feel that way because I've slowly become a good person.

The theme for this week for me is giving up the obsession with things being "right" right now.

I didn't wake up wanting to be someone else. I didn't have regrets about yesterday, or any yesterday back and back and back. I'm reconciled with life. There was a lot of work to get where I am and there's still work today. The task was and is a lot lighter because of the people in recovery who came before me and those who have directly guided me with their example and words.

My life is precious now, because I'm invested in it. I thank God that I was able to learn how to live through 12-step recovery.

Personal inertia works for recovery as well as addiction

My outlook, my habits, my way of life developed over many years. This did not happen over night. In the case of my addiction, years of selfish and destructive behavior. That is the way I lived. And living like that, that's how I expected to live. The habits became ingrained.

Habitual behavior establishes personal inertia. The definition of inertia is the tendency of a body to maintain its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force. We usually understand inertia as staying still, but in physics, it means that something in motion will stay in motion. This is true in space more than here on earth, so it takes a thought experiment to understand it. If you were driving your car in space (where there's no gravity or friction) and you took your hands off the wheel and foot off the accelerator, you would continue to go in the same direction forever at the same speed. You'd travel on and on because of inertia until some other force intervened.

So, as an addict, I built up a personal inertia to keep doing addictive things. There was a momentum that continually suggested options that would reinforce my addictive behaviors. The cycle. There were other forces working against the addiction, of course: my wife's feelings, my basic need to make money, my shrinking self-respect, etc. But these forces were weaker than the personal inertia of my addiction.

So then I hit bottom, right? Unfortunately, everything didn't stop for me when I hit bottom. My personal inertia kept me going, and keeps a lot of addicts going. Maybe we don't feel the same way about our addictive behaviors, but we keep doing them. We've taken our foot off the accelerator, as it were, but the car keeps moving.

So, how do we get moving in the right direction? The first way is to take our foot off the accelerator. Gratefully, there is a lot of anti-addict friction in our universe. But the brakes will only stop us, they won't get us going in the right direction.

What can get us going in the right direction is recovery work, of course. Recovery work can turn us around.

The problem is, you start your recovery work while you still have a lot of addiction momentum. And it takes a long, long time to turn it around. It takes an enormous amount of effort to reverse our trajectory. One dilemma is we tend not to notice how much our little effort is working against our large inertia. It does not seem to make much of a difference. I'm personally sure, though, that it does make a difference. Every little bit helps, so it's important to do recovery work every day. It adds up.

Amazingly, it's also been my experience that when I do my small part, my higher power will do the rest. There is a multiplier effect to working in the direction of God's will for me. I am truly powerless over my addiction, the inertia is too great, but with God's help I can get better. God's will for me, as best as I can understand it, is for me to be healthy, happy and free for my own sake and so that I can be of service to God.

Thankfully, recovery work started working for me long before I recognized the connection to God's will. The same can be true for anyone, no matter their belief or lack thereof.

The upside of this is if you get going in the right direction -- building momentum towards living in harmony with God's will --you will have positive personal inertia that will make it easier and easier to make the right choices and live free, happy and healthy. What a blessing it is to know this after years of despair. What a blessing it is to share this.