Well, tomorrow night I leave on a much awaited two week adventure in Germany to visit my brother, sister-in-law and nephew. You can check them out here Air and Sun and Nudeln. This trip has been a long time coming - I was supposed to go almost a year ago and couldn't because of being diagnosed with breast cancer. And despite the insanity of my job and my amazing inability to live in the present, I am determined to enjoy every second of it - to be in the moments instead of in between them, to be fully present and in the now. Because if know one thing - it is that life is short and can be ripped right out from underneath you in a life altering split second. Like we always say in AA meetings, we all have the same 24 hours. I try to remain ignorant to the unpredictability of life, but the fact is, you just never really know, do you? I have failed repeatedly to appreciate the journey - focusing instead on the ever changing and always disappointing destination.
The moments I most enjoy, are the moments right after I feel the most afraid. Those are the only moments that I can seem to remember and appreciate what matters in life - like I have probably said, the worst feeling I have ever felt is thinking I might die, and not have another chance to get this right. Can you even imagine the kind of regret that you feel - I can, I have felt it. So it is the journey, and not the destination - and I will try to remember that on Friday morning around 6 am my time when I've been up for 24 hours and am dead tired and ticked off at all of the people who are irritating me.
Anyway - I see this trip as something else, not just a trip to see my brother but as an opportunity for something greater. I am afraid that in the past 5 months since I finished cancer treatment, I have already lost much of the perspective I had gained about life. I have been plagued lately by a feeling that things need to change. Frequently it is about escaping - how can I escape myself, how can I escape what I am feeling? Just because I don't use alcohol doesn't mean I don't use something. I use other people, sometimes, when I have the opportunity. Usually I use my job. This isn't about escaping though - this is about changing. I told my sponsor that I need to come back and be different. I need to be different. She says, of course, if you want to be different, then you have to act differently. I need to experience the complete psychic change that the Big Book talks about. How does one accomplish this? Pray your ass off she tells me. And by the way, my sponsor also says that a spiritual experience doesn't have to be this white light moment when you connect with your higher power. A spiritual experience may be as simple as having the ability to choose that which you could not choose before.
Fortunately, lately, I have been experiencing a lot of discomfort with old behaviors. I always say that we do what we do until it becomes painful enough, and then we stop. We never stop a second sooner. There is this threshold of pain - and my tolerance is incredibly high. But I realized today, for the first time in a quite a while, that something I do, suddenly feels painful enough that I want to stop. For the first time - with this particular situation, the pain that I feel when I don't engage in it is ever so slightly less painful than the pain that I feel when I do. The scale has tipped, finally.
So, this is about regaining perspective and letting go of a bunch of old stuff that I don't want in my life anymore. This is about changing - this is about really getting down to the very root of what makes me so uncomfortable with myself, and choosing to live differently. I don't know why, but it's just time to be rid of old behavior and old people in my life that don't belong there. It's just time, I don't know why now, and not before, but it's time. And I know from experience, that amazing things happen in those moments when you finally surrender.
No comments:
Post a Comment