I remember in my recovery from addiction, and have remarked about this before in this blog, wondering if there would come a time when my spiritual progress would be such that I would have "made it" and could ride off into the sunset of recovery with an internalized assurance that all is not only well in the present but would always be well in the future regardless of life's happenings. I guess that type of thinking is due at least in part to the Hollywood model or paradigm of life whereby the protagonist in life's drama would reach such an awesome state of spiritual progress that there would be a magnificent swelling of trumpets, violins, and cymbals, and the scene would slowly fade into darkness with the message that the hero woud live a problem-free life forever after.

Alas,recovery from addiction, no matter the duration or the spiritual progress, does not follow the traditional Hollywood model, and realities and problems do happen, followed by human reactions to them that are driven by self-centered emotions and thinking errors, such as fear, self-pity, plus accompanying physical and emotional pain. The cause for this reflection is my recent injury resulting in a broken ankle and disruption of my seemingly ordered world–I am now in a wheelchair, cannot drive, work, or do much of anything for a while.

But, hold on a minute! After some prayer and meditation, support from my wife and good friends in recovery, I am quickly back into a mindset in which I can truthfully say: "Fundamentally all is well." The reality of my life at this moment has not changed but my reaction to that reality has. Indeed, on further reflection, the spiritual tools of recovery can and do offer a "Hollywood ending" except that the ending is really a series of spiritual adjustments to life's realities using recovery tools. Before finding a spiritual way out of addiction, I was controlled by life's problems and my self-centered and self-defeating reactions to them. Now, though it may take some time, I have the spiritual tools to be OK in the midst of reality problems.

As always, comments are invited. Jan Edward Williams,www.alcoholdrugsos.com,09/07/2013.