October 11

Eyeglasses and attitudes 

 “Our best thinking got us into trouble….  Recovery is an active change in our ideas and attitudes.”

Basic Text, p. 53

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In active addiction, the world probably looked like a horrible place.  Using helped us tolerate the world we saw.  Today, however, we understand that the world’s condition wasn’t really the problem.  It was our ideas and attitudes about the world that made it impossible for us to find a comfortable place in it.

Our attitudes and our ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see our lives.  If our “glasses” are smudged or dirty, our lives look dim.  If our attitudes aren’t well focused, the whole world appears distorted.  To see the world clearly, we need to keep our attitudes and ideas clean, free of things like resentment, denial, self-pity, and closed-mindedness.  To insure our vision of life is in focus, we have to bring our ideas in line with reality.

In addiction, our best thinking kept us from clearly seeing either the world or our part in it.  Recovery serves to correct the prescriptions in our attitudinal eyewear.  By stripping away our denial and replacing it with faith, self-honesty, humility, and responsibility, the steps help us see our lives in a whole new way.  Then the steps help us keep our spiritual lenses clean, encouraging us to regularly examine our ideas, our attitudes, and our actions.

Today, seen through the clean lenses of faith and recovery, the world looks like a warm, inviting place to live.

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Just for today:  I will view the world and my life through the clean spiritual lenses of my program.