Wisdom Of The Rooms - 2017

[bluidkiti]

April 10

Quote of the Week

“If God had made today perfect, there would be no tomorrow.”

As an alcoholic, I have a lot of black and white thinking. Things are either all right, or they are all wrong – there is very little in between. Before I got sober, this kind of thinking was a big handicap in my life. If I didn’t do something perfectly, then I considered myself a failure that day – and for all the days in the future as well. If something didn’t go right, I just gave up and became resentful. By the end of my drinking, I learned to not even try any more.

When I entered recovery and looked at the Twelve Steps for the first time, I secretly gave myself 30 days to do them. If they didn’t work, then I was going back out. When I finally got a sponsor, he told me we would work a Step a month. “What?!” was my reaction. He asked me how long I had been drinking, and I told him years. He told me I didn’t get to my bottom in 30 days, and that I wouldn’t recover that quickly either. He told me to consider sobriety as “slowbriety.”

As I worked through the Steps, one of the defects of character I discovered I had was perfectionism. As I slowly wrote a fearless and thorough Fourth Step inventory, I realized I hid behind the unrealistic ideal of perfection to escape the messy and difficult work of progress. When my sponsor pointed out that in the program we strive for “progress not perfection,” it released me from my obsession and allowed me to grow, to keep trying, and to value and appreciate the progress I was making. I finally learned that if I failed today, I could learn from it and try again tomorrow.
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I’m glad God didn’t make today perfect, and I’m grateful for all the tomorrows I have.