Investment
Investments are a tricky business. They’re also serious business. Investments require sacrifice from the beginning and throughout the life of their management. Investments require the sacrifice and surrender of any limiting and depressing practices. Investments have a possibility of decline but also great potential increase and rewarding payoff.
People invest in things with the intent of seeing a profit of some sort in the future. The initial decision to invest is based on a desire for improvement in some manner and creating a want or need in the mind as a driving force behind that desire. The decision to invest is initially calculated with risk and reward as primary factors in the decision making, as well as determining current assets and liabilities and how those will function with the investment now and over time.
Don’t be alarmed, this is not an alcoholics guide to financial security piece, though depending on the interpretation of the terminology, it very well could be.
This is a piece about investing in the future. Money or other physical assets are not directly involved and the investment we are going to investigate has consequences and rewards that greatly outweigh anything material.
The initial investment decision for an alcoholic with a desire to change and regain manageability over their life is a big leap. For many it’s a high-risk decision as it involves putting all of the eggs you have left into one basket. Some of these eggs are cracked, some broken with their contents leaking out, crying for a humpty-dumpty miracle to reassemble them from what remains. Despite knowing the ongoing repetition of abusing one part of our lives after another, we alcoholics have a knack for denying that the destruction of our lives will end with a loss of everything, which could include life itself.
The few eggs that remain in our basket, i.e. the relationships, life-functions, employment, freedom outside of incarceration, etc., are part of the investment change toward sobriety and ultimately recovery. These are assets as long as they are treated as assets and have the energy of future potential. If sobriety can be started and a determination to see change is established, these assets will become stronger as each of them aids in the effort to change. The remaining influences in the alcoholic’s life, some barely hanging on and close to severing ties, are a powerful part of the fuel that will be needed to drive the engine of recovery. Even the person that has nothing left still has community resources and other tangible connections if they are willing to seek them out and show ongoing efforts to change.
We need a diverse base of assets because its generally accepted that life-change requires community involvement. A gathering of relationships, followed by ongoing, trust-building action provides security in the investment. Recovery with longevity and the intention of permanence is close to impossible without a foundation of people and community as its reliable backing. Investment in our lives requires solid assets we can build on.
Moving forward in recovery requires a continued and dedicated growth of the assets that keep each of us solvent. My life as a drinking alcoholic was bankrupt, a result of a long period of downward trends and self-destructive behavior. My life as an alcoholic practicing recovery is immersed in moving as far away from bankruptcy as possible by building my assets, reinvesting them, and expanding my portfolio.
My portfolio is a showcase of my best attributes. As I discussed in other posts, those attributes are honesty, integrity, character, honorable intent, service, openness to change, responsibility, accountability and patience, to name a few. As I move forward in recovery, I can use my existing assets to develop these attributes, and then reinvest those attributes back into my assets. This expands my asset base, giving me more infrastructure and scaffolding to fall back on in the case of a calamity in my life-circumstances. In other words, the development and growth of my characteristics, or attributes, has a direct relationship to the people and activities I surround myself with. As I improve as a person and my life moves forward in a direction that is in tune with my vision(s), more people and positive elements will naturally gravitate toward me. This cycle will continue to maintain strength in my recovery and benefit those people that I hold dear to in my life. It’s reciprocal, it’s symbiotic, and like any other wise investment it reflects a conscientious effort to limit risk and encourage growth.
Sobriety is the first step towards stability in recovery. But sobriety alone is not recovery, and maintaining just sobriety carries a great deal of risk for lapse. It’s akin to stuffing a meager savings into a mattress. That savings doesn’t have any purchasing power in its current state, and even when it is pulled from the mattress, it has lost value and then what it is spent on will not have anything but material gratification, and then it’s gone. The desire for sobriety, and the potential to take what you have (which may be very meager) and invest it in your future requires a willingness to change. It begins with changing the way you think, the way you act, and the theaters you put your character into play in. These three things are an incredibly strong method of creating a wealth of opportunity and growth.
Changing the way you think is a difficult task, but one that can be spread out over time. It involves coming to grips with the issues in your past that have continually led to bankruptcy, as well as the irresponsible habits that have been developed. It’s about taking a moral inventory of everything that has led up to alcoholism, and then dissecting it to make sure you’re not investing what little you have in a set of scams against yourself. When in the drunken lifestyle of alcoholism, the dis-ease will continually demand more of the alcoholic and never give anything back. Using a continually deceptive practice to deprive someone out of their possessions is the textbook definition of fraud. An alcoholic uses the continually deceptive practice of using the drink to avoid their life and life-circumstances, which deprives them of living that life with any quality, while at the same time alienating, destroying and betraying all of the parts of their life that have value. Once the drinking is halted, the first logical step of recovery is to find people, groups and activities that can aid in changing thinking patterns from destructive to constructive. It also involves abandoning the habits that constantly funnel behaviors towards taking a drink. This is a long-term investment that takes patience and determination to keep from cashing out and taking a drink again. It’s also about investing in yourself a little at a time and accumulating a stronger foundation, while practicing recovery by imagining newer ways to grow it. Returning to the concept of building up my assets while expanding my portfolio, I’m changing my investment methods with the intent of growth, while at the same time eliminating the methods of failure in my past that led to bankruptcy.
The way I act is a direct reflection of the way I think. Granted, life is situational, and improvisation is often a part of day-to-day activities. Yet the belief systems I rely on to determine my moral and functional compass always direct me toward my actions. As proof, think of something you’ve done in the past few weeks that has gone against your “better judgment”. Most people can’t because their judgment is based on what they already have established in their belief system. Re-imagining, re-establishing or re-creating a belief is no easy task. It’s akin to having an investment that is seemingly working and realizing growth, but then shifting your assets to another type of investment that is unproven to you personally but has a track record of success. Just making the change involves a risk and means admitting that what you held true wasn’t the best thing for you and your assets, and could be improved on. In some cases, it could mean you were altogether wrong in what you believed to be right.
The beginnings of recovery involve admitting that the practice of drinking has gotten out of control and that our lives have become unmanageable. This has led to a desire for change. In my case, my drinking was an integral part of my belief system. I believed it was what was best for me, ahead of family, community, employment, and my own self-respect. It took a necessary and monumental change in my life to jerk my mind free of that belief. As I moved forward I had to accept that a belief that took up a huge percentage of my time, presence and spirit was faulty to the core. I also had to examine many of the other beliefs in my life. Some of those beliefs involved my self-perception of my own potential based on the events of my past. Other beliefs were whether the people I surrounded myself with had a stake in my current and future growth in recovery. I examined my vocations and the negatives each carried. I had to abandon many of the facades and parlor tricks I had accepted as truth in my life
It was important that I loosened the grip on all of my beliefs, and was prepared to abandon or table any of them. Particularly in the early phases of my investment in recovery, I had to determine and arrange all of my influences so that going forward I had removed the negative, maintained the necessary, and could add positive assets to my portfolio. Anything I was clinging to that was tied to my drinking had to go, regardless of how painful it was to release it. I was sacrificing the prior investments that led me to bankruptcy and filling that void with assets and investment plans that would lead me to a life of well-being.
Growth requires careful planning and patience. It also requires a vigorous analysis of the domain that growth will begin from and grow into. Growth is the continual investment into our life, now and in the future. Through growth, each of us expands and branches out to new spaces, relationships, thoughts and beliefs. The continual movement away from the damaging and detrimental actions that plagued our past and towards the positive interactions and visions we develop can only allow for a payoff in the future. An investment in the future that begins now, is continually developed moving forward, and has plans and visions for the future is recovery.