DAILY PONDERABLES
Together WE Trudge The Road OF Happy Destiny
Daily Reflections
SELF-RESTRAINT
Our first objective will be the development of self-restraint.
TWELVE STEPS AND TWELVE TRADITIONS, p. 91
My drive to work provides me with an opportunity for self-examination. One day while making this trip, I began to review my progress in sobriety, and was not happy with what I saw. I hoped that, as the work day progressed, I would forget these troublesome thoughts, but as one disappointment after another kept coming, my discontent only increased, and the pressure within me kept mounting.
I retreated to an isolated table in the lounge, and asked myself how I could make the rest of the day. In the past, when things went wrong, I instinctively wanted to fight back. But during the short time I had been trying to live the A.A. program I had learned to step back and take a look at myself. I recognized that, although I was not the person I wanted to be, I had learned to not react in my old ways. Those old patterns of behavior only brought sorrow and hurt, to me and others. I returned to my workstation, determined to make the day a productive one, thanking God for the chance to make progress that day.
From the book Daily Reflections
© Copyright 1990 by Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
A.A. Thought for the Day
How good a sponsor am I? When I bring new members to a meeting, do I feel that my responsibility has ended? Or do I make it my job to stay with them until they have either become good members of A.A. or have found another sponsor? If they don't show up for a meeting, do I say to myself: "Well, they've had it put up to them, so if they don't want it, there's nothing more I can do?" Or do I look them up and find out whether there is a reason for their absences or that they don't want A.A.? Do I go out of my way to find out if there is anything more I can do to help? Am I a good sponsor?
Meditation for the Day
"First be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift to God." First I must get right with other people and then I can get right with God. If I hold a resentment against someone, which I find it very difficult to overcome, I should try to put something else constructive into my mind. I should pray for the one against whom I hold the resentment. I should put that person in God's hands and let God show him or her the way to live. "If a man say: 'I love God' and hateth his brother, he is a liar, for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"
Prayer for the Day
I pray that I may see something good in every person, even one I dislike, and that I may let God develop the good in that person.
From the book Twenty-Four Hours a Day
© Copyright 1975 by Hazelden Foundation
NA - Just for Today
Eyeglasses And Attitudes
"Our best thinking got us into trouble.... Recovery is an active change in our ideas and attitudes."
Basic Text p.53
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.
Just for today: I will view the world and my life through the clean spiritual lenses of my program.
From the book Just for Today
© Copyright 1991-2013 by Narcotics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
Thought for Today
"If you are humble nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace,
because you know what you are."
--Mother Teresa
There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change in my viewpoint.
~ Denis Diderot
Good Morning Higher Power of My Understanding
GRANT ME
Serenity to accept that I am an Alcoholic
and that I am helpless and powerless over alcohol.
Courage, willingness and the ability to change my thinking,
my attitude and actions concerning alcohol
and not drinking – Today!
Wisdom to know that You are my Higher Power
and only with Your help, am I able to not take that
“first drink” today and stay sober today!
Grant me Your Grace
To accept I am powerless to not drink on my own will.
And the Wisdom to know that after my “First Drink”,
I am not the same person who promised . . .
“I will not drink today”! I will continue to drink and drink.
It Is . . . Only One Day at a Time!
Today … I will not drink that “First Drink”
James Patrick M.
Buddha/Zen Thoughts
If we have...presence of mind then whatever work we do will be the very tool which enables us to know right and wrong continually. There's plenty of time to meditate, we just don't fully understand the practice, that's all. While sleeping we breathe, eating we breathe, don't we? Why don't we have time to meditate? Wherever we are we breathe. If we think like this then our life has as much value as our breath, wherever we are we have time.
-Ajahn Chah, "Taste of Freedom"
Native American
"Men and women have an equal responsibility to restore the strength of the family, which is the foundation of all cultures."
--Haida Gwaii Traditional Circle of Elders
The family is the heartbeat of strength of the culture. The grandfathers and grandmothers taught their children; they in turn had children who taught their children. If the family isn't taught the culture, then the children become adults and the adults become the grandfathers and grandmothers and the result is the culture becomes lost. This is how language is lost; this is how dances are lost; this is how knowledge is lost. We need to listen to our Elders, today, before it's too late.
Great Spirit, teach me the culture so I can teach the children.
Keep It Simple
May you live all the days of your life.
--- Jonathan Swift
The truth is, life's hard. Accepting this fact will make it easier. Remember how well it worked in Step One? Once we admitted and that we were powerless over alcohol and other drugs, we were given the power to recover. It works the same with life’s problems.
We can spend a lot of energy trying to avoid life’s hardships. But our program teaches us to use the same energy to solve our problems. Problems are chances to better ourselves and become more spiritual. We have a choice: we can either use our energy to avoid problems, or we can face them. When we stop wasting energy, we start to feel more sure of ourselves.
Prayer for the Day: Higher Power, life is to be lived, both the easy and the hard parts. Help me face and learn from it all.
Action for the Day: I’ll work at not complaining about how hard life is. I’ll take the same energy and us it to solve problems I may face.
TWELVESTEPS
and
TWELVE TRADITIONS
Step Twelve (pgs 119-120)
Compatibility, of course, can be so impossibly damaged that a separation may be necessary. But those cases are the unusual ones. The alcoholic, realizing what his wife has endured, and now fully understanding how much he himself did to damage her and his children, nearly always takes up his marriage responsibilities with a willingness to repair what he can and to accept what he can’t. He persistently tries all of A.A.’s Twelve Steps in his home, often with fine results. At this point he firmly but lovingly commences to behave like a partner instead of like a bad boy. And above all he is finally convinced that reckless romancing is not a way of life for him.
A.A. has many single alcoholics who wish to marry and are in a position to do so. Some marry fellow A.A.’s. How do they come out? On the whole these marriages are very good ones. Their common suffering as drinkers, their common interest in A.A. and spiritual things, often enhance such unions. It is only where “boy meets girl on A.A. campus,” and love follows at first sight, that difficulties may develop. The prospective partners need to be solid A.A.’s and long enough acquainted to know that their compatibility at spiritual, mental, and emotional levels is a fact and not wishful thinking. They need to be as sure as possible that no deep-lying emotional handicap in either will be likely to rise up under later pressures to cripple them. The considerations are equally true and important for the A.A.’s who marry “outside” A.A. With clear understanding and right, grown-up attitudes, very happy results do follow.
And what can be said of many A.A. members who, for a variety of reasons, cannot have a family life? At first many of these feel lonely, hurt, and left out as they witness so much domestic happiness about them. If they cannot have this kind of happiness, can A.A. offer them satisfactions of similar worth and durability? Yes—whenever they try hard to seek them out. Surrounded by so many A.A. friends, these so-called loners tell us they no longer feel alone. In partnership with others—women and men—they can devote themselves to any number of ideas, people, and constructive projects. Free of marital responsibilities, they can participate in enterprises which would be denied to family men and women. We daily see such members render prodigies of service, and receive great joys in return.
Where the possession of money and material things was concerned, our outlook underwent the same revolutionary change. With a few exceptions, all of us had been spendthrifts. We threw money about in every direction with the purpose of pleasing ourselves and impressing other people. In our drinking time, we acted as if the money supply was inexhaustible, though between binges we’d sometimes go to the other extreme and become almost miserly. Without realizing it we were just accumulating funds for the next spree. Money was the symbol of pleasure and self-importance. When our drinking had become much worse, money was only an urgent requirement which could supply us with the next drink and the temporary comfort of oblivion it brought.
Big Book
"For most normal folks, drinking means conviviality, companionship
and colorful imagination. It means release from care, boredom and worry. It is joyous intimacy with friends and a feeling that life is good. But not so with us in
those last days of heavy drinking. The old pleasures were gone. They were but memories. Never could we recapture the great moments of the past. There was an insistent yearning to enjoy life as we once did and a heartbreaking obsession that some new miracle of control would enable us to do it. There was always one more attempt — and one more failure."
~Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition, A Vision For You, pg. 151~
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