Attraction
I’m attractive. Not my face or my outward appearance. All of that is rather plain and aged. Even in my youth the heads I turned were infrequent. Back then and today, I would try to present myself as clean kept and put together. I move with just enough swagger to elicit confidence. I want people to find my book jacket attractive, at least to some degree.
I find myself in that position in group settings, in the general public and face to face encounters. Even in the morning mirror I’ll still take a look to make sure a post pubescent pimple isn’t forming 40 years too late.
But all that is superficial. We live in a world of superficiality. People prim and puff themselves up, wearing this mask or that costume to gain a perception from others that ranges from the bizarre to the pious. Sometimes that attraction works, but other times it can be repelling, depending on the societal circle that surrounds us.
Superficial attraction is a common goal of most people because it gives a more immediate gratification and signaling of how we are perceived. But there are deeper levels of attraction that aren’t so immediate and take a good amount of self-awareness to conceive, put into motion, and benefit from.
I’m not sure I realized it at the time, but when I first took the serious and scary step into abandoning alcohol and change my life, and therefore begin my journey into recovery, I was looking for ways to make myself attractive to sobriety. In that same regard, I was trying to find ways to make myself unattractive to alcohol.
I was already of the opinion that alcohol was unattractive. It wrecked my health, nearly wrecked my marriage, put me into a state of complete disfunction, and caused me self-loathing, resentment and harm. If a person did to me what alcohol had accomplished, I’d want to strangle them. But there’s a difference between finding alcohol unattractive and making myself unattractive to alcohol. In order to repel alcohol as a factor in my life, I had to set my life up as something where alcohol was not welcome and unnecessary, and the things I sought to treasure were within my grasp.
The same things are true of sobriety through recovery. I definitely wanted to be sober, and I was attracted to the principles of recovery to achieve that. Yet in order to make recovery work I had to make myself attractive to it by learning those principles and then placing them into practice. If any person reading this took just a couple of basic tenets, applied them to their life-circumstances and then practiced them, I can guarantee that more principles would come forth from the attractive nature of active recovery. Once the mindset is produced that I want recovery to work and therefore I am going to make myself as attractive to it as possible, it’s like a high-powered magnet, and a buildup will ensue that makes drinking distant and increasingly unlikely.
Something awesome about making recovery attractive is the elements that a person puts into practice are also things they want in their lives in addition to sobriety. For instance, I want to be happy. I’m not naïve enough to believe that I’m always going to be happy, that’s ridiculous. But I try to make myself attractive to happiness. How do I do this? First of all, I’m sober; I will lead with that every time. But in addition to that I try to engage in positive thinking, positive behavior and positive action. Even in light of negative possibilities or circumstances, an unbending effort has to be made to remedy a situation, even if it’s just a mental viewpoint for me personally, bringing myself back to making myself attractive to happiness. That’s not always easy, but an awareness of it and an effort to disengage from unhappiness makes the difference.
Happiness is just one example. Others are peace, confidence, strength, intelligence, proficiency, reliability, love, and spiritual power. You could place any positive descriptor of what you wanted to have as a characteristic. By realizing what it would take to make yourself attractive to a thing and then practicing attraction, I am confident that what defines your world would become inclusive of it.
I started this piece by talking about practicing superficial attractions. But hopefully by now I’ve at least hinted about deeper levels of attraction. These are attractions that are developed by mental thought, vivid imagination, spiritual connection, and manifestation of interests.
Mental thought involves coming up with an idea that I find interesting and beneficial. This is where I discover something about me that may already be attractive and I want to enhance, or that I see in others and want to develop in my own self in my own unique way. I’m constantly in a state of discovery about what will make me a better me.
A great part of this is through imagination. I can imagine my future self as a character that is an enhanced version of me, then develop a vision that is vivid enough to believe possible. If I can imagine something then foresee it I can put it into reality. From there it’s a matter of determining what about me I need to change or add that will make me attractive to my vision. By practicing the characteristics, over time and with patience I can become what was once only in my imagination.
This process is truly magical in my view. It takes a connection with a spiritual power that allows me to take that which is unreal and make it real. The spiritual influences around me can be tapped into as part of what drives the change and creates a better me.
A great way to describe this is manifestation. Manifesting is a process of taking my dreams or visions and then by using belief I can turn them into reality. In a world of change the most I can change is everything. Under that assumption, there should be no limit to the amount I can manifest. And since I can choose what and to what degree I want to change, the variance of my manifestation is up to me, and can be adjusted mid-stream if I want.
Throughout all of this there is a definite purpose in making myself attractive to the smaller and bigger pictures of who I am. It starts with who I am now and then transcends to who I want my future self to be. It’s based on a solid understanding of what is already attractive about me and the things that are unattractive. In a nutshell, I am eliminating the things I don’t want from my character development, developing the things I want to enhance or add to me, and determining each of those aspects as time goes on. It’s not a rush to judgment for any of these decisions or practices, as it takes time for change to foment. Constant awareness of my life under my direction and intent fits in perfectly with an effective recovery program.