Who Are Your Friends?

October 27, 2018 / Tim / 3 Comments

There’s the old say: you are what you eat. It makes sense, if you eat garbage you can’t expect to have the body of an olympic athlete. The movie “Supersize Me” demonstrated just how quickly that change can take place. There’s also another truism:

“Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future” -Dan Pena

Hanging around with the same five or six people will keep all of you at the lowest common denominator in terms of interests, pursuits and goals. If I try to improve myself, those friends of mine will often, unconsciously and without malice, hold me back from reaching new goals. I do it to myself as well: I wonder what the ‘group’ will think if I do this? By the time I hit bottom in my addiction, I was mostly hanging out with others who used the way I used. If I was going to survive and recover, I needed to get away from that environment.

There was a study done years ago on fleas. A bunch of fleas were put into a jar and the lid was put on. After a few days of bumping their heads, the fleas learned to jump only as high as just below the lid of the jar. When the lid was removed, these fleas didn’t jump out of the jar. They stayed at their level because the believed they couldn’t jump higher than they were jumping. Even subsequent generations of fleas only jumped as high as their parents because well, that’s only as high as fleas jump. However, if you took one of the fleas from this jar and put it into another jar where the fleas were jumping twice as high, it didn’t take long before the flea learned to go far beyond its former limit.

The message for us is very similar. If we stay in an environment where limits are put upon us by social pressures and our own beliefs then making permanent changes in our lives is very difficult. For those of us in recovery, making the choice to be clean and sober is often regarded with skepticism by those we hung around with. It’s important in the beginning to seek out others in recovery to help us and encourage us to move forward. We don’t necessarily drop our old friend, but we spend less time with them. Our common interests are changing. As we move forward in our recovery, they may see the results and want the same, or not. Ours is a program of attraction; it can’t be sold.

I have little in common with those who are still in their disease. I hope someday they will receive their own gift of desperation and find recovery. I will gladly help in whatever way I can but it’s up to them. I am grateful for my friends in recovery. It’s a very different group of people from my old group. And they continue to assist and challenge me in my recovery. They help me soar in my recovery, showing me that I can not only jump, I can fly, higher than I ever thought was possible.

Just Say It!

October 20, 2018October 15, 2018 / Tim / Leave a comment

“There is value in stating the obvious. What is obvious to me is not obvious to others. What seems simple and clear to you is confusing to me.” Teresa Colón

We live in a world where everyone presumes to know about everything and everyone else. We think we know what the next person is thinking. And why not? We live our lives connected to social networks, email, TV and telephones. Viral videos circle the globe in the time it takes to boil an egg. We work and socialize with like minded people so we all think alike, right?

We just don’t see things from the same perspective. My past and my priorities cause me to focus on things that you don’t because of your perspective. What for me is ‘common sense’ might not be the same for you. While the article that caught my attention (link below) has its focus more on the business/work environment, it is also very true in any relationship. I can’t read your mind and you can’t read mine so please tell me what you are thinking. Not telling me will lead to errors in judgement, anger and resentments. You see the young woman, and I see the old lady.

Here in Costa Rica we have teeny ants that appear out of nowhere to feast on even a single crystal of sugar. Obviously you don’t leave the sugar out. But not everyone knows that. Guests in my home are blissfully unaware of the little critters. I try to make a point about this whenever I pull the sugar bowl from the fridge. My ‘obvious’ isn’t yours. If I don’t tell you, you’ll never know.

Ask couples living who’ve just starting living together about the importance of stating the obvious. Hanging the roll of toilet paper with the end over the top seems a no brainer, unless of course you have a cat. Do you take the garbage out the night before or early morning is a question of how adaptive the racoons and monkeys are in your neighbourhood. Leaving the keys in the deadbolt at night might just save a life in an earthquake. Don’t feed a dog chicken bones. I know these things, but you might not because your experience may be very different from mine.

State your expectations. Many a family trip has been ruined because what the parents want for their children is way different from what their children have in mind. An open discussion before leaving on the trip about the various details can resolve many issues before they even arise. There’s a whole generation between parents and children and that gap still exists between adult children and their parents. This makes a world of difference in perspective and values.

It just make things a whole lot easier if we stated what we think is the ‘obvious’ because: ‘it isn’t’. Human relations are hard enough without adding to the burden by leaving things unsaid, by making assumptions and by having expectations. As the saying goes, when you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME. Just say it.

Here’s Teresa’s complete article from Medium.com:

https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-value-of-stating-the-obvious-e500451125fd

Returning to the River

September 21, 2018 / Tim / 2 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything, let alone sat down to write this blog. I’d like to say it’s because I was on vacation, too busy with a variety of projects or any other number of reasons other than the truth: I lost heart.

I lost heart because I allowed my ego to stand in my way, an ego that told me that what I do wasn’t making a difference. It said that what I was doing in life was’t important and I didn’t matter. It said that I really don’t matter. My ego speaks to me in many different ways but usually it does so subtly, undermining my self esteem bit by bit and bringing me down lower with each nip. Slowly I start to believe that I am worth less than I was before until I start to see myself as unworthy and then, worthless.

We usually think of ego as bravado and pride and over rating ourselves: an ego trip is where we build ourselves up way above where we are. But the opposite is also true. An ego trip can also bring us down low and into depression and despair. In both cases I am thinking only about me; I’m better than everyone else–I’m worse than everyone else. Either way, I am deep within ‘self’. And in my case, when I get into ‘self’, that’s when my disease of addiction starts to make inroads to take over.

I am grateful that I am in a recovery program that helps me to recognize when I’ve pulled the plug on the sink and am heading down and circling the drain. I know I need to stop the stream of negativity and move forward. I can start thinking about myself as I am: neither perfection nor damnation. I can remind myself that I am on a journey and that it’s up to me to take the next step and move forward or wallow in the mire. I can make the allow myself to believe that I’m stuck in the mud at the edge of the river and that this is my destination and I don’t deserve any more. But I don’t have to stay here and wallow in the muck of my own making, believing that’s all there is to life.

And so, bit by bit, I am taking back what I allowed my ego to take from me. I don’t have to do it all in one day. All I need to do is stand up and look around at where I am; I don’t want to be here so I can step up out of the muck where the land meets the river and back onto the river. I don’t have to be success and perfection: I want to head toward a destination where I am true to myself, my heart. And it all begins with a decision and an action: returning to the river.