Pearl Six

Beginning(s)

I was looking through some of my different sayings, mottos and morals, and one caught my eye.

Today is the beginning of my story.

Today truly is the beginning of my story, as is every day.  Today is a new sheet of paper; I have a quill in hand, and it’s up to me to pen it.  The 20,265 days of my story that have proceeded today are still relevant and have purpose behind what will be written today.  Today is an open and unfinished book, and I can change the direction of the story as I see fit.

As the author of days, I must be cognizant of the good and bad chapters of my life.  Each part of the storyline makes up the backdrop and setting for my new beginning today.

For an alcoholic in recovery this is an important way to look at life.  The past is made up of the errors of my ways and the blessings I have given and received.  How I’ve lived isn’t without consequence and responsibility, and it doesn’t have to determine how I live today.  What I was carries personality traits and lifestyle that I can choose to carry forward or keep behind.  Each day I decide what to apply, develop and create.

Living each day allows me to develop my habits. Habits are both good and bad for me.  It seems that bad habits are very hard to break, but if I think about it good habits are just as hard to break.  Often good habits replace bad ones and bad ones bring good habits down.  In order for my habits to become a habit each must be practiced repetitively, good or bad.  My alcoholism was practiced for decades.  It was drinking a little at first, increasing gradually, until by the time of my last drink it was waking until passing out with the cheap vodka and beer.  It was a deeply established habit.  So far it has taken deeply established therapy and change to keep my recovery as the habit that replaced it.

A popular method of keeping track of sobriety is counting days sober.  It’s fulfilling, like little blue ribbons to be worn on my lapel of achievement.  I still count my days from time to time.  As of this writing I have 548 days without a drink which is equivalent to 18 months.  Even with that, every new day I have only 1 day of sobriety. Today’s sobriety is the only thing I can control and accomplish.  My 548 days is an achievement I want recognize but not focus on.

Recovery is about taking it one day at a time as much as possible.  There are many recovery stories of people that have decades of sobriety under their belt only to have a simple lapse that leads right back to the bottle.  The immediacy of it is astounding.  So the one day at a time idea is very much about vigilance with myself.  Over-confidence and hubris in my sobriety can very easily lead to the alcoholic voice in my mind convincing me I can handle a taste.  I cannot.    

A lapse in my sobriety doesn’t mean my past sobriety is null and void.  If my vigilance is lost, the effort is not.  Sobriety for any amount of time proves that a person can do it for a longer period of time, even forever if there is dedication and devotion.  If I were to fall off the wagon, the wagon stops and waits for me.  It’s a lot easier to get right back on than to wander around in the dark and try to find it again.

Those lessons of recovery are never gone, and the wheel of recovery doesn’t need to be reinvented.  Alcohol makes me quick to not care, and sobriety brings me back to clarity.  Today I can be sober and rededicate myself to myself and my sobriety without letting shame get in the way or by discarding the efforts of recovery I had before drinking.  Yes, there is disappointment in myself for not living up to my own established and practiced expectations, but there is also a new page that is clean and free of blemish to write my story on.

Tying myself down with burdens of the past is stagnant and unfulfilling.  Beginning now and moving forward is a great gift of life.  Each day is a new adventure from the smallest bit of creativity to the sky and beyond, and it can and does happen without addiction.

Once upon a time a man named Terry…