Ray A.'s Blog, page 6
December 6, 2014
The Virtue of Tolerance
Tolerance is one of the virtues that figure in our Step 4 inventory as a corrective to anger and resentment, the others being patience, kindness, and compassion. It is also the underlying principle in Tradition 3, which makes a desire to stop drinking the only requirement for membership.
Tolerance is an antidote to anger and resentment because its opposite, intolerance, is naturally conducive to these emotions. As a character defect, intolerance focuses on a perceived difference in a person which arouses ill will and inclines us to eschew, exclude, condemn, or otherwise reject that person.
The anger and the resentment typical of intolerance result, not necessarily from anything the person has done to us, but from the mere fact that the person is different. It is not that we have been wronged, but that there is a perceived wrongness in the person that in some way impinges on something that is important to us and which we therefore find objectionable, offensive, or threatening. To our eyes, the difference effectively defines the person, and so we reject the one along with the other.
By contrast, tolerance accepts the person as a person without necessarily accepting the perceived difference. Whereas intolerance focuses its attention on the difference, tolerance subordinates the difference to the person, focusing on a greater commonality and ultimately on her intrinsic worth and dignity as a person. In so doing it takes the edge off ill will with its attendant destructive emotions.
Intolerance is a comparative vice or character defect. What leads to intolerance is a comparison where we come out on top. We detect a difference which redounds to our advantage and makes us, in some way, superior. Intolerance is therefore one of the many faces of pride.
Our inventory pulls the rug from under intolerance because it shows us how seriously flawed we really are and how much harm we have done to people. We are no better than anyone and no one is worse than us. It fosters tolerance because it shows us that we suffer from a common spiritual illness that accounts for our defects of character and emotion and the wrongs that we inflict upon each other.
When we see others as fellow sufferers, we no longer see them as fundamentally different from us. We identify in the things that most matter, and as we do intolerance weakens and anger and resentment diminish. Tolerance then becomes a natural disposition.
[Note: The above text is part of a larger post, including quotations and additional resources, in "Practice These" at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...]
Tolerance is an antidote to anger and resentment because its opposite, intolerance, is naturally conducive to these emotions. As a character defect, intolerance focuses on a perceived difference in a person which arouses ill will and inclines us to eschew, exclude, condemn, or otherwise reject that person.
The anger and the resentment typical of intolerance result, not necessarily from anything the person has done to us, but from the mere fact that the person is different. It is not that we have been wronged, but that there is a perceived wrongness in the person that in some way impinges on something that is important to us and which we therefore find objectionable, offensive, or threatening. To our eyes, the difference effectively defines the person, and so we reject the one along with the other.
By contrast, tolerance accepts the person as a person without necessarily accepting the perceived difference. Whereas intolerance focuses its attention on the difference, tolerance subordinates the difference to the person, focusing on a greater commonality and ultimately on her intrinsic worth and dignity as a person. In so doing it takes the edge off ill will with its attendant destructive emotions.
Intolerance is a comparative vice or character defect. What leads to intolerance is a comparison where we come out on top. We detect a difference which redounds to our advantage and makes us, in some way, superior. Intolerance is therefore one of the many faces of pride.
Our inventory pulls the rug from under intolerance because it shows us how seriously flawed we really are and how much harm we have done to people. We are no better than anyone and no one is worse than us. It fosters tolerance because it shows us that we suffer from a common spiritual illness that accounts for our defects of character and emotion and the wrongs that we inflict upon each other.
When we see others as fellow sufferers, we no longer see them as fundamentally different from us. We identify in the things that most matter, and as we do intolerance weakens and anger and resentment diminish. Tolerance then becomes a natural disposition.
[Note: The above text is part of a larger post, including quotations and additional resources, in "Practice These" at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...]
November 2, 2014
The Virtue of Serenity
The practice of serenity starts in Step 3 through the Serenity Prayer. This links serenity directly to acceptance as the most immediate tool which can bring us peace amidst the storms of daily life.
The Serenity Prayer and acceptance do not stand alone, however. They rest on another prayer and another tool which come before them. This is the 3rd Step Prayer and the surrender that we begin to practice through it.
In Step 3 we end the war. We give up all resistance and cease all hostilities. We stop fighting God and make peace with him. We accept his terms, which are not unreasonable: we admit that he’s God and we are not. We surrender our will to his and accept his guidance and direction for our life. We start to rest on him, to trust him and to look to him for our peace and our security, confident that we are loved and will be cared for, whatever the circumstances.
Reconciliation with God is the spiritual foundation of our serenity and peace of mind. Acceptance of who he is and who we are make all other acts of acceptance possible. Based on our reconciliation with him, we seek to reconcile to life and to reconcile with others. We embark upon a continuing process of surrender and acceptance through the Steps of self-examination, confession, and restitution.
As we take inventory and admit to our character and emotional defects, and as we become willing to surrender them and pray for their removal, we start to be relieved of the shortcomings and troubled emotions that rob us of all peace. As we become willing to forgive those who have wronged us and make amends to those we have wronged, calm is restored to our heart and harmony to our relationships.
It is as we take these steps and walk along the path toward reconciliation that AA makes one of its most comforting promises: “We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace.”
Note: The above text is part of a larger post in "Practice These," at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...
The Serenity Prayer and acceptance do not stand alone, however. They rest on another prayer and another tool which come before them. This is the 3rd Step Prayer and the surrender that we begin to practice through it.
In Step 3 we end the war. We give up all resistance and cease all hostilities. We stop fighting God and make peace with him. We accept his terms, which are not unreasonable: we admit that he’s God and we are not. We surrender our will to his and accept his guidance and direction for our life. We start to rest on him, to trust him and to look to him for our peace and our security, confident that we are loved and will be cared for, whatever the circumstances.
Reconciliation with God is the spiritual foundation of our serenity and peace of mind. Acceptance of who he is and who we are make all other acts of acceptance possible. Based on our reconciliation with him, we seek to reconcile to life and to reconcile with others. We embark upon a continuing process of surrender and acceptance through the Steps of self-examination, confession, and restitution.
As we take inventory and admit to our character and emotional defects, and as we become willing to surrender them and pray for their removal, we start to be relieved of the shortcomings and troubled emotions that rob us of all peace. As we become willing to forgive those who have wronged us and make amends to those we have wronged, calm is restored to our heart and harmony to our relationships.
It is as we take these steps and walk along the path toward reconciliation that AA makes one of its most comforting promises: “We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace.”
Note: The above text is part of a larger post in "Practice These," at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...
September 7, 2014
A Longing Transformed
Watching the other night a visually stunning movie set in another time and place, I had an old and a familiar pang of longing: to be somebody else, born and raised in a different country and in a different century and speaking a different tongue. Such longing was a common occurrence in the past. I had never wanted to be me, to be where I was, to be in the present.
I had altered my name over the years and rejected other aspects of my identity. I had romanticized the past and idealized other countries and cultures. I had been an avid listener of “foreign” music, a devotee of “foreign” films, a student of “foreign” languages and literatures.
This was my own way of responding to a feeling that is said to be common among alcoholics: the sense of being different, of being apart from rather than a part of, of not belonging. It's a feeling that takes many forms. Feeling like a foreigner is the form that it took for me. It was a feeling that I sought to escape, not by trying to blend and fit in or by reaffirming my particular foreignness, but by striving to be different in a different way.
What I longed for the most was to be a different foreigner than the foreigner I was. Or that others wanted me to be, for everybody seemed to want to define me and tell me who I was. I wanted to recreate myself in my own image and so to be in control of my own identity. I wanted to become my own idealized version of the stranger.
The idealist impulse, they say, is also symptomatic of the alcoholic. Bankrupt idealists, the Big Book says we are. For me that sometimes took the form of a flight into an imaginary past that never existed; other times into an imaginary future that never could. I was always yearning for things to be different, always, as Rilke says, overcome with longing.
So when that pang of longing went through me that night as the beauty of an idyllic countryside seized hold of my imagination, I smiled in recognition. I knew that craving well, the bitter-sweet sentiment and the drinking that always went with it.
But this time the feeling was fleeting. It was immediately replaced by a realization of what my old longing had been. It had been a rejection. A rejection not just of reality and of myself in some philosophical or psychological sort of way, but more fundamentally and more spiritually, a rejection of God. I wished to be someone other than the person God had created. It was a rejection of God’s grace, and of his will for me.
With that realization the old longing was instantly replaced by a new and now an increasingly more familiar feeling. That feeling was gratitude. Gratitude for everything. For the beauty of the movie, for the art and the talent that had made it possible, for my being able to understand a tongue that I loved and that was no longer foreign, for my being an alcoholic, for my recovery, for who I had been and was now becoming, for the very gratitude I was feeling.
I realized at that moment that here too the promises of the program were becoming true. God was doing for me what I could not do for myself. A greater ideal was becoming a deeper reality. An emotion of disaffection and alienation that had marked my character and my personality when I drank no longer ruled my heart. It had been eased out by another.
Longing had been overcome. Or better yet, transformed and restored to its proper object. For longing seems to be a natural disposition, responding perhaps to a sense of separation and alienation from a spiritual reality to which we truly belong and in which we find our true identity and our true home. Gratitude seems to gradually fill the longing, bridging the distance and bringing us closer, enabling us to live more fully in the here and the now. Sometimes even joyously.
I had altered my name over the years and rejected other aspects of my identity. I had romanticized the past and idealized other countries and cultures. I had been an avid listener of “foreign” music, a devotee of “foreign” films, a student of “foreign” languages and literatures.
This was my own way of responding to a feeling that is said to be common among alcoholics: the sense of being different, of being apart from rather than a part of, of not belonging. It's a feeling that takes many forms. Feeling like a foreigner is the form that it took for me. It was a feeling that I sought to escape, not by trying to blend and fit in or by reaffirming my particular foreignness, but by striving to be different in a different way.
What I longed for the most was to be a different foreigner than the foreigner I was. Or that others wanted me to be, for everybody seemed to want to define me and tell me who I was. I wanted to recreate myself in my own image and so to be in control of my own identity. I wanted to become my own idealized version of the stranger.
The idealist impulse, they say, is also symptomatic of the alcoholic. Bankrupt idealists, the Big Book says we are. For me that sometimes took the form of a flight into an imaginary past that never existed; other times into an imaginary future that never could. I was always yearning for things to be different, always, as Rilke says, overcome with longing.
So when that pang of longing went through me that night as the beauty of an idyllic countryside seized hold of my imagination, I smiled in recognition. I knew that craving well, the bitter-sweet sentiment and the drinking that always went with it.
But this time the feeling was fleeting. It was immediately replaced by a realization of what my old longing had been. It had been a rejection. A rejection not just of reality and of myself in some philosophical or psychological sort of way, but more fundamentally and more spiritually, a rejection of God. I wished to be someone other than the person God had created. It was a rejection of God’s grace, and of his will for me.
With that realization the old longing was instantly replaced by a new and now an increasingly more familiar feeling. That feeling was gratitude. Gratitude for everything. For the beauty of the movie, for the art and the talent that had made it possible, for my being able to understand a tongue that I loved and that was no longer foreign, for my being an alcoholic, for my recovery, for who I had been and was now becoming, for the very gratitude I was feeling.
I realized at that moment that here too the promises of the program were becoming true. God was doing for me what I could not do for myself. A greater ideal was becoming a deeper reality. An emotion of disaffection and alienation that had marked my character and my personality when I drank no longer ruled my heart. It had been eased out by another.
Longing had been overcome. Or better yet, transformed and restored to its proper object. For longing seems to be a natural disposition, responding perhaps to a sense of separation and alienation from a spiritual reality to which we truly belong and in which we find our true identity and our true home. Gratitude seems to gradually fill the longing, bridging the distance and bringing us closer, enabling us to live more fully in the here and the now. Sometimes even joyously.
July 14, 2014
Anger
Anger and resentment are the subjects of our 4th Step inventory in the Big Book. As an emotion, anger arises from a perception that one has been intentionally wronged. It responds to an act (or omission) that we see or construe as unjust or unfair, an offense or injury against our person or something important to us. The Big Book lists some of these concerns as our self-esteem, pocketbooks, ambitions, and personal relations. The 12&12 sums them up as our concerns for “sex, security, and society.”
Anger motivates the aggrieved person to redress the injustice and punish the offender. As such, it is morally necessary. Whether a specific instance of anger is good and morally right, or bad and morally wrong, depends on whether the response fits the offense. Anger goes wrong when my perception is wrong: I see an offense where there is none, or I see a greater offense than there actually is; or I see offensive intent where none exists or the offender is not morally responsible or culpable; or what I perceive to be the offender is not in fact the offender. Anger goes wrong also when my concern is wrong. Concerns go wrong when they are excessive, morally or spiritually out of order, or pursued at the expense of others. If I suffer from an excessive desire for respect, for instance, I will see signs of disrespect everywhere and my ire will be frequently aroused.
Because of our spiritual disease, our perception and our concerns are often likely to be self-centered and thus distorted, and hence our anger defective. That is, our anger tends to be of the self-righteous variety, often driven by pride, a hurt ego being its most common cause. In our warped sense of justice, we are prone to take offense too quickly, too often, too intensely, and for too long—the latter issuing in a smoldering resentment which disposes us to still more anger.
Our inventory is designed to reveal the cause of our anger and resentment in distorted perceptions and concerns and in the character defects that lie behind them. Its purpose is to foster a spiritual awakening which transforms those perceptions and concerns and which enables us to surrender those defects of character and replace them with their countervailing virtues, such traits as humility, serenity, acceptance, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness. This is how we become progressively free from emotions that in the past drove us to the bottle and in sobriety can still mar our recovery and sabotage our relationships.
Note: The above text is part of a larger post in "Emotions," at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...
Anger motivates the aggrieved person to redress the injustice and punish the offender. As such, it is morally necessary. Whether a specific instance of anger is good and morally right, or bad and morally wrong, depends on whether the response fits the offense. Anger goes wrong when my perception is wrong: I see an offense where there is none, or I see a greater offense than there actually is; or I see offensive intent where none exists or the offender is not morally responsible or culpable; or what I perceive to be the offender is not in fact the offender. Anger goes wrong also when my concern is wrong. Concerns go wrong when they are excessive, morally or spiritually out of order, or pursued at the expense of others. If I suffer from an excessive desire for respect, for instance, I will see signs of disrespect everywhere and my ire will be frequently aroused.
Because of our spiritual disease, our perception and our concerns are often likely to be self-centered and thus distorted, and hence our anger defective. That is, our anger tends to be of the self-righteous variety, often driven by pride, a hurt ego being its most common cause. In our warped sense of justice, we are prone to take offense too quickly, too often, too intensely, and for too long—the latter issuing in a smoldering resentment which disposes us to still more anger.
Our inventory is designed to reveal the cause of our anger and resentment in distorted perceptions and concerns and in the character defects that lie behind them. Its purpose is to foster a spiritual awakening which transforms those perceptions and concerns and which enables us to surrender those defects of character and replace them with their countervailing virtues, such traits as humility, serenity, acceptance, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness. This is how we become progressively free from emotions that in the past drove us to the bottle and in sobriety can still mar our recovery and sabotage our relationships.
Note: The above text is part of a larger post in "Emotions," at http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...
April 16, 2014
Billy's Death
Billy’s Death
News arrived yesterday of Billy’s death. He was just a boy when I met him, probably around ten. Raised with two other siblings in a loving middle-class suburban home, he would grow up to be what most people would consider a successful young man, marrying and starting a lucrative career in a major city’s financial sector. He was still in his 30’s when he lost his job and that career came to a sudden halt. Billy began to drink. Before long his life was reduced to the bottle and his reclining chair, where he would sit and drink and fall asleep, day in and day out, hardly bothering to leave his loft apartment in a trendy section of town. His now ex-wife apparently continued to play the caretaker, while he remained literally paralyzed. One day a blood clot traveled to his lung and he died. The official cause of his death will probably be listed as a pulmonary embolism or whatever the proper technical term may be. But we know what killed Billy. He was only 53.
That was just about my age when I lost a store I had in that same city and began to slip into an emotional relapse after 12 years sober. I don’t know the details of Billy’s story, but I suspect that for him, just like for me, work meant everything. Identity, purpose, meaning, self-worth, all derived from what I could do through my work. The rest was tangential, including my sobriety, though I gave lip service to the idea that it came first. In practice, my time, my energy, and my passion were singularly devoted to growing the business, not to growing me. Family, relationships, and—to the extent that he was now present in my life—God, were but accessories to that all-consuming endeavor.
It had always been that way, and when I got sober, that view of life didn’t change. The way that I saw myself, other people, and my place in the world, and what I cared about and invested myself emotionally in, those things remained the same. My spiritual awakening had been sufficient to get me sober and make enough adjustments to make my life manageable for a while, but not enough to change who I really was as a person. I continued to think, to feel, and to act pretty much as I always had, for those things had the force of habit in me and they ruled me. I only avoided some of the extremes that had brought such ruin in the past.
Having tried to build my recovery on the foundations of a lifeview that had failed me before, it was inevitable—for a power-driver like me who could never stand still and was always grasping for more—that the whole edifice would collapse. And it did. Over the course of six years I lost practically everything except for my physical sobriety. It took an even lower bottom and a deeper surrender experience to shake up the way I saw things and to give a new spiritual foundation to my recovery.
Up to that point the place that work had held in me would be defined in theological terms as idolatry. Work, and especially achievement (it was never about money), was the god that I placed before God and before everything else. In philosophical terms, I had made an absolute out of the relative, trying to find ultimate and lasting meaning in the proximate and temporary. As I now apprehended things God came first, and all value had its source in him.
Whatever our individual understanding, when work and the things of the material world substitute for or take precedence over those of the spiritual, experience shows that we are in for trouble. We might argue over the interpretation, but we can’t argue over the facts. If we sacrifice our family, our relationships, our health, and our recovery for work, there’s always a price to pay. And, in the end, work itself will leave us wanting. We can’t get second things by putting them first.
Work continues to be a problem for many of us in AA long after we’ve stopped drinking. It is often a primary source of our emotional instability and the unmanageability that comes with it. We may talk about it at meetings, admit we are workaholics and read all the books on the subject we can get a hold of, and try to work the Steps. Yet the obsession remains.
It cannot be otherwise. The Steps work to the extent that we practice the principles in them. Those principles are designed to change in a spiritual, God-centered direction, our perception of life and of the things that matter in it. If we continue to see work through the same lenses and continue to give it an inordinate place in our hearts, we will continue to get the same results. Our instinctual and habitual drives for emotional and financial security, for a place in society, for status, recognition, and prestige, will continue to sabotage our sobriety and even to dominate our lives.
We need to see differently, to put work in its proper spiritual perspective. We can do this if we work the 1st Step and practice its first principle of surrender with specific regard to our outlook and motivation, admitting that our vision and the desires and drives that emanate from it and that move us are out of line with reality and that we are powerless to change them, that the way we’ve been seeing things doesn’t work and that we need a new way, a new vision, a new perspective.
Surrender makes the practice of the other principles possible, starting with the virtue of humility, which Bill W. stresses time and time again is a matter of perspective, of how we see ourselves in the larger scheme of things, an inability to admit and to accept our limitations being central to our problem with work and our often overly ambitious attitudes. Some of us have done a 4th Step inventory on work, but we've often focused on the symptoms and ignored the underlying issue of vision and valuation. We will find that once work is put in its proper place, many of the problems associated with it ceased being problems. They matter less, because work matters less.
Some of us come to this place with most of our lives intact. Some of us have to lose much of what we have and hit bottom again. Some of us never come to it, and we live a joyless recovery riddled with tension and stress. Some of us drink, and, like Billy, we die.
News arrived yesterday of Billy’s death. He was just a boy when I met him, probably around ten. Raised with two other siblings in a loving middle-class suburban home, he would grow up to be what most people would consider a successful young man, marrying and starting a lucrative career in a major city’s financial sector. He was still in his 30’s when he lost his job and that career came to a sudden halt. Billy began to drink. Before long his life was reduced to the bottle and his reclining chair, where he would sit and drink and fall asleep, day in and day out, hardly bothering to leave his loft apartment in a trendy section of town. His now ex-wife apparently continued to play the caretaker, while he remained literally paralyzed. One day a blood clot traveled to his lung and he died. The official cause of his death will probably be listed as a pulmonary embolism or whatever the proper technical term may be. But we know what killed Billy. He was only 53.
That was just about my age when I lost a store I had in that same city and began to slip into an emotional relapse after 12 years sober. I don’t know the details of Billy’s story, but I suspect that for him, just like for me, work meant everything. Identity, purpose, meaning, self-worth, all derived from what I could do through my work. The rest was tangential, including my sobriety, though I gave lip service to the idea that it came first. In practice, my time, my energy, and my passion were singularly devoted to growing the business, not to growing me. Family, relationships, and—to the extent that he was now present in my life—God, were but accessories to that all-consuming endeavor.
It had always been that way, and when I got sober, that view of life didn’t change. The way that I saw myself, other people, and my place in the world, and what I cared about and invested myself emotionally in, those things remained the same. My spiritual awakening had been sufficient to get me sober and make enough adjustments to make my life manageable for a while, but not enough to change who I really was as a person. I continued to think, to feel, and to act pretty much as I always had, for those things had the force of habit in me and they ruled me. I only avoided some of the extremes that had brought such ruin in the past.
Having tried to build my recovery on the foundations of a lifeview that had failed me before, it was inevitable—for a power-driver like me who could never stand still and was always grasping for more—that the whole edifice would collapse. And it did. Over the course of six years I lost practically everything except for my physical sobriety. It took an even lower bottom and a deeper surrender experience to shake up the way I saw things and to give a new spiritual foundation to my recovery.
Up to that point the place that work had held in me would be defined in theological terms as idolatry. Work, and especially achievement (it was never about money), was the god that I placed before God and before everything else. In philosophical terms, I had made an absolute out of the relative, trying to find ultimate and lasting meaning in the proximate and temporary. As I now apprehended things God came first, and all value had its source in him.
Whatever our individual understanding, when work and the things of the material world substitute for or take precedence over those of the spiritual, experience shows that we are in for trouble. We might argue over the interpretation, but we can’t argue over the facts. If we sacrifice our family, our relationships, our health, and our recovery for work, there’s always a price to pay. And, in the end, work itself will leave us wanting. We can’t get second things by putting them first.
Work continues to be a problem for many of us in AA long after we’ve stopped drinking. It is often a primary source of our emotional instability and the unmanageability that comes with it. We may talk about it at meetings, admit we are workaholics and read all the books on the subject we can get a hold of, and try to work the Steps. Yet the obsession remains.
It cannot be otherwise. The Steps work to the extent that we practice the principles in them. Those principles are designed to change in a spiritual, God-centered direction, our perception of life and of the things that matter in it. If we continue to see work through the same lenses and continue to give it an inordinate place in our hearts, we will continue to get the same results. Our instinctual and habitual drives for emotional and financial security, for a place in society, for status, recognition, and prestige, will continue to sabotage our sobriety and even to dominate our lives.
We need to see differently, to put work in its proper spiritual perspective. We can do this if we work the 1st Step and practice its first principle of surrender with specific regard to our outlook and motivation, admitting that our vision and the desires and drives that emanate from it and that move us are out of line with reality and that we are powerless to change them, that the way we’ve been seeing things doesn’t work and that we need a new way, a new vision, a new perspective.
Surrender makes the practice of the other principles possible, starting with the virtue of humility, which Bill W. stresses time and time again is a matter of perspective, of how we see ourselves in the larger scheme of things, an inability to admit and to accept our limitations being central to our problem with work and our often overly ambitious attitudes. Some of us have done a 4th Step inventory on work, but we've often focused on the symptoms and ignored the underlying issue of vision and valuation. We will find that once work is put in its proper place, many of the problems associated with it ceased being problems. They matter less, because work matters less.
Some of us come to this place with most of our lives intact. Some of us have to lose much of what we have and hit bottom again. Some of us never come to it, and we live a joyless recovery riddled with tension and stress. Some of us drink, and, like Billy, we die.
February 17, 2014
In All Our Affairs: Practicing Patience
Patience is the virtue that enables us to function well in situations that require waiting over an extended time where the waiting is experienced as a weight or a burden. The waiting may be for something negative or undesirable (uncertainty, discomfort, inconvenience, unpleasantness, difficulty, hardship, provocation, pain, suffering) to cease, or for something positive or desirable (which is expected, anticipated, or hoped for) to be realized or fulfilled.
Virtues enable us to function well, and in the case of patience to function well is to wait well. This is to take things in stride and be willing to endure the delay graciously, calmly, with serenity and equanimity, and without complaint. To function poorly is to vent dissatisfaction and experience such emotions as annoyance, frustration, irritation, or exasperation in the case of those situations we wish to cease, or to experience anxiety, fear, or diminishing hope with regards to those situations we wish to materialize.
The latter are all signs of impatience, a term which designates both a defect of character and an emotion. If we are impatient by character, we are habitually inclined to see waiting as an unbearable burden, and are easy prey to the emotion. As a felt emotion, impatience expresses itself in bodily behaviors such as sighing, huffing, fidgeting, tapping one’s fingers, shaking one’s head, and rolling one’s eyes. All of this has the effect of reinforcing and increasing the feeling of impatience.
The attitudes and emotions which patience promotes help us to make the best of what may not be the best of situations and keeps us from creating a worse one. They also help us to assist others sharing the burden of time with us to also wait well. Impatience, on the other hand, generates attitudes and emotions which can easily degenerate into rudeness, unkindness, anger, and impulsive action. This makes of impatience something more than a minor defect, which is the way it is often regarded, and of patience more of a necessary virtue.
Unlike perhaps most virtues, the situations which call for the exercise of patience are easy to recognize. They all involve waiting and delay, typically under circumstances over which we have no control. In most cases, there is nothing we can do to hurry things up, which is what impatience desires.
But though we may have no control over the situation, we do have some control over our perception of it. This suggests one way we can practice patience. Granted that our perception of delay is accurate, we can intensity that perception and increase our impatience, or de-intensify it and decrease it. We can intensify it, say at an unusually long supermarket register line, by keeping track of how many people are in front of us, how full each shopping cart is and how long it’s taking the cashier to ring up and bag each item, and noticing by contrast how much faster other lines seem to be moving, all of which may give us the very strong impression that we are stuck with a slow, incompetent, or clueless cashier and therefore have a “right” to be impatient. Or we can de-intensify it by taking our eyes and our attention off the whole situation and, let us say, taking out a book, our E-Reader, or our IPad. This will ease our discomfort, and might even make the waiting enjoyable.
The issue here is not one of distraction but of perception. Distraction is a technique, a way of modifying our perception of a situation. As an emotion, impatience results from the way we see a situation. If we can change the way we see it, we can change the way we experience it emotionally. When waiting, one way to do that, as in our example, is by intentionally reducing our conscious awareness of our circumstance. This helps to dull or blunt the feeling of delay, and at the same time keeps our eyes from turning into magnifying lenses and blowing the problem out of all proportion.
Changing the way we see a situation also involves changing our view of what’s involved in the situation for us, the main thing about it that concerns us. In waiting, that is principally our time. We don’t have time to wait. We have things to do and places to go. Thus another way of lessening the burden of time and being able to wait more patiently is by modifying the value that we place on our time in a given circumstance. I usually carry a book around because for me, like for many of us, time is of the essence and I don’t want to waste any of it. Time, however, can become a tyrant. We can try to squeeze more out of it than is possible, cramming too much into our schedule, not giving ourselves sufficient time to accomplish things or to get places. There just doesn't seem to be enough hours in a day. We are always rushing. Always behind.
By overvaluing time and making unreasonable demands of ourselves and others in relation to it, we create the conditions that foster impatience. Recently I had hurried off to chair a meeting when, as I approached the town’s railroad crossing, the barriers started to lower. I had to laugh. I had just been working on this article, and the situation was all too familiar. I had chaired a meeting in another town and another state where I had to get through two railroad crossings and over a drawbridge. Since I seldom made allowance for these potential delays, getting stuck and having to watch an endless train of railroad cars drag painfully along was pure torture. Never mind that we were talking about only two or three minutes here. I didn’t have two or three minutes.
If we are always pressed for time, we won’t handle delay well. It’s that simple. We may have to lower the premium that we place on that commodity. We may need to put things in their right perspective and be able to see that, in many situations, there are things more important than “our” time. Time is a gift, God’s gift, when seen spiritually. It is to be valued and to be used wisely. But to use it wisely, it needs to be valued rightly. Some of us may tend to put time ahead of everything, sacrificing first things for second things on the altar of efficiency, productivity, and achievement. Our impatience may sometimes flare up because we feel we don’t have enough time to do our work. People are always calling on us. Helping others becomes a chore. Yet, we know we are called to serve, and we don’t necessarily get to decide who, when, and under what conditions.
When I was new in the program, I started to make a point of slowing down when I walked. This was very unlike me, and totally counter to my fast-paced, big-city environment and the business I was in at the time. But being sober, I became aware that walking fast and rushing everywhere made me feel agitated and all worked up physically, so that I tended to do everything else fast: talk fast and drive fast and make quick decisions and react quickly and automatically. This helped to shorten an already short fuse, since 25 years of drinking and trying to have it my way left me with a severe anger problem. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the tools to make the change last, and I soon reverted to my old self.
Looking back, I can now see that I was intuitively on the right track. By slowing down I was trying to deal with my (constitutionally) impatient self. But I didn’t know that. At the time, I knew nothing about patience or virtue or practicing any principles or how lasting change actually comes about. Now I understand that slowing down and being patient are two sides of the same coin. So I now try taking my time and slowing my pace when I walk, drive, speak, think, and make decisions. The result is that I am less prone to impatience and less susceptible to anger, in the past one of my defining character traits.
Impatience is experienced as an urge or a desire to hurry things up. Slowing down counters that urge, helping to quiet the mind and the body. It helps to avoid the physiological correlates that poise me for impatience and takes the edge off impulsive speech and action. When I slow down deliberately and intentionally, I increase my ability to respond to situations more consciously and reflectively and less automatically and reflexively.
To practice slowing down with regards to speaking and thinking is to listen more and try to understand better, and not be in a hurry to speak and interrupt people. It is to wait and weigh our words before we respond to a question or statement or to an opinion we might not agree with. Waiting and thinking things through before we talk can make the difference between having a cordial and fruitful discussion and getting into a needless argument, particularly when dealing with sensitive or controversial issues. Sometimes, especially when challenged or provoked, we may slow down to a complete halt and practice patience by holding our peace and practicing silence, quelling the urge to respond instantly and in kind. In slowing down our thinking and giving things due reflection and deliberation, we avoid jumping to conclusions, making hasty judgments and evaluations, and taking ill-considered action.
Slowing down also makes us more aware of bodily expressions of impatience, making it possible to deliberately refrain from indulging them and thus weakening their aggravating effect on the emotion. Instead, we may be able to practice contrary behaviors, such as breathing more deeply and slowly, adopting a sympathetic and understanding expression, or bringing our hands together in a pose characteristic of and conducive to reflection.
When we are prone to impatience with people in particular and not just with a situation in general, we are usually looking at them in terms of some perceived defect. We may find the person slow in performing a task, learning a lesson we are teaching, getting a point we are making, or getting to a point they are trying to make. In these cases, the weight of time is duration. But there are many cases where the burden involves not only extension, but repetition. A sense of “There he goes again” comes over us.
These situations typically involve frequent or repeated contact with the same person. Consider the rooms. Those who are in the habit of going on and rambling way beyond the allotted time may do so again at the next meeting, and at the meeting after that. Those who have a penchant for preaching, lecturing, or saying exactly the same thing over and over again, may continue to do so on every occasion. Those who tend to interject “you know” every other sentence will likely continue to do that every time they speak. In all these cases the repetitive or recurring nature of the behavior adds extra weight to the burden of time.
If we find these behaviors annoying or irritating, a little charity might help. We might consider that those who indulge them are probably not even aware of what they are doing, such being the nature of habit. A little humility might also help. We might consider that there are probably things about us that try other people’s patience, and of which we have no clue.
Situations often call into play more than one virtue, just as they present a temptation to more than one character defect. Defects don’t work in isolation from each other, and neither do the virtues. To be patient we usually have to draw on other virtues which help to foster patience and forestall impatience and related opposite traits.
One of these is acceptance. When I find waiting an unbearable burden, it is often because I find it an unacceptable one. If I accept the burden, then I can bear it. Acceptance gives us the ability to wait for things to take their course and gain perspective on them before we decide on a course of action. It allows time for reflection and takes the edge off impulsivity.
Acceptance furthers patience in as much as in accepting we take things as they are and are not overly concerned with or desirous of changing them. If impatience is wanting X to happen without further delay, then patience is not having that concern or desire, that is, accepting the circumstance as it is. If I accept X, then I’m not impatient for X to cease, though I may very well like it to. If I accept that Y is not yet the case, then I’m not impatient for Y to be, though I would likely welcome it.
Impatience wants a circumstance other than that which obtains. If I accept my loved one as she is, then I am free from feelings of impatience toward her when her shortcomings keep cropping up, or when she regularly displays behavior which I might not find altogether pleasing, because I no longer desire her to be somebody other than who she is.
Gratitude is another aid to patience. In waiting for what we want, gratitude can help us to appreciate and be thankful for what we have, taking the pressure off the waiting. In a traffic jam, we can summons many reasons to be grateful. For some of us that can be something as simple as the fact that we have a car. Not everyone can afford one, and perhaps there was a time when drinking left us so broke that we couldn’t afford one ourselves, or when we couldn’t drive one because a DWI resulted in a suspended license. We may even be grateful that we can drive at all. If we live long enough, the time will come when we won’t even be able to do that. All of this takes a little perspective, but perspective is precisely what we want to cultivate. It helps us to take the long view and not allow the force of the immediate but temporary to blind us to what really matters.
Other virtues can help. Generosity for instance. Generosity is often associated almost exclusively with giving money. But giving of our time and attention to others is one of its highest forms. This is particularly the case when dealing with those who are ill, where patience is most in demand and its value most evident. Then there is faith. I can grow in patience in proportion to my belief that God is in absolute control of my life, of other people, and of circumstances. Things will happen in God’s time, not in mine.
This brings us to two virtues that are close neighbors of patience and with which they are sometimes confused. One is perseverance. The other tolerance.
As with patience, with perseverance time is also the governing factor. But with perseverance, time is not so much a matter of waiting and experiencing a burden. Perseverance is goal-oriented. It is directed toward achieving an objective through continuous, steady effort over the long haul. Here time is our ally, and rather than waiting we are moving and taking action. I persevere by sticking to my course, surmounting obstacles and difficulties and not allowing myself to become discouraged and slacken or abandon my efforts. I persevere until my efforts bear fruit, but I’m not waiting for that eventuality. I’m consistently working toward it. A point may come, however, where progress seems slow and the goal distant. It is then that I have to draw on patience to help me persevere.
As regards tolerance, the governing factor is difference, not time. Tolerance is practiced with regards to perceived differences in people, patience with regards to perceived delay in time. The two may dovetail, which is why they are conflated. A long-winded person may try our patience, but if what he’s being longwinded about reflects a viewpoint we vehemently object to, he will also be trying our tolerance. Someone may say “I have no patience for stupid people” when what they are really saying is that they are intolerant of them. They don’t want to admit to intolerance because it is generally seen as a more objectionable character defect than impatience and is less culturally acceptable. Tolerance is made possible because as we grow spiritually in our recovery we no longer see others as being fundamentally different from us. That can also help us to be patient with them.
To practice a virtue as a virtue then, we have to have a good grasp of what that virtue is, what its opposite vice or defect is, and what other virtues can help to foster the one and discourage the other. We also have to recognize the types of situations which call that virtue forth, so that we can get increasingly better at working the virtue into them. And we have to know what to do and what not to do in those situations. This starts with adjusting our glasses to see the situation through the eyes of the virtue (patience) and not of the character defect (impatience).
Note: The text above is part of a larger post in "Practice These: The Virtue of Patience," in http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...
Virtues enable us to function well, and in the case of patience to function well is to wait well. This is to take things in stride and be willing to endure the delay graciously, calmly, with serenity and equanimity, and without complaint. To function poorly is to vent dissatisfaction and experience such emotions as annoyance, frustration, irritation, or exasperation in the case of those situations we wish to cease, or to experience anxiety, fear, or diminishing hope with regards to those situations we wish to materialize.
The latter are all signs of impatience, a term which designates both a defect of character and an emotion. If we are impatient by character, we are habitually inclined to see waiting as an unbearable burden, and are easy prey to the emotion. As a felt emotion, impatience expresses itself in bodily behaviors such as sighing, huffing, fidgeting, tapping one’s fingers, shaking one’s head, and rolling one’s eyes. All of this has the effect of reinforcing and increasing the feeling of impatience.
The attitudes and emotions which patience promotes help us to make the best of what may not be the best of situations and keeps us from creating a worse one. They also help us to assist others sharing the burden of time with us to also wait well. Impatience, on the other hand, generates attitudes and emotions which can easily degenerate into rudeness, unkindness, anger, and impulsive action. This makes of impatience something more than a minor defect, which is the way it is often regarded, and of patience more of a necessary virtue.
Unlike perhaps most virtues, the situations which call for the exercise of patience are easy to recognize. They all involve waiting and delay, typically under circumstances over which we have no control. In most cases, there is nothing we can do to hurry things up, which is what impatience desires.
But though we may have no control over the situation, we do have some control over our perception of it. This suggests one way we can practice patience. Granted that our perception of delay is accurate, we can intensity that perception and increase our impatience, or de-intensify it and decrease it. We can intensify it, say at an unusually long supermarket register line, by keeping track of how many people are in front of us, how full each shopping cart is and how long it’s taking the cashier to ring up and bag each item, and noticing by contrast how much faster other lines seem to be moving, all of which may give us the very strong impression that we are stuck with a slow, incompetent, or clueless cashier and therefore have a “right” to be impatient. Or we can de-intensify it by taking our eyes and our attention off the whole situation and, let us say, taking out a book, our E-Reader, or our IPad. This will ease our discomfort, and might even make the waiting enjoyable.
The issue here is not one of distraction but of perception. Distraction is a technique, a way of modifying our perception of a situation. As an emotion, impatience results from the way we see a situation. If we can change the way we see it, we can change the way we experience it emotionally. When waiting, one way to do that, as in our example, is by intentionally reducing our conscious awareness of our circumstance. This helps to dull or blunt the feeling of delay, and at the same time keeps our eyes from turning into magnifying lenses and blowing the problem out of all proportion.
Changing the way we see a situation also involves changing our view of what’s involved in the situation for us, the main thing about it that concerns us. In waiting, that is principally our time. We don’t have time to wait. We have things to do and places to go. Thus another way of lessening the burden of time and being able to wait more patiently is by modifying the value that we place on our time in a given circumstance. I usually carry a book around because for me, like for many of us, time is of the essence and I don’t want to waste any of it. Time, however, can become a tyrant. We can try to squeeze more out of it than is possible, cramming too much into our schedule, not giving ourselves sufficient time to accomplish things or to get places. There just doesn't seem to be enough hours in a day. We are always rushing. Always behind.
By overvaluing time and making unreasonable demands of ourselves and others in relation to it, we create the conditions that foster impatience. Recently I had hurried off to chair a meeting when, as I approached the town’s railroad crossing, the barriers started to lower. I had to laugh. I had just been working on this article, and the situation was all too familiar. I had chaired a meeting in another town and another state where I had to get through two railroad crossings and over a drawbridge. Since I seldom made allowance for these potential delays, getting stuck and having to watch an endless train of railroad cars drag painfully along was pure torture. Never mind that we were talking about only two or three minutes here. I didn’t have two or three minutes.
If we are always pressed for time, we won’t handle delay well. It’s that simple. We may have to lower the premium that we place on that commodity. We may need to put things in their right perspective and be able to see that, in many situations, there are things more important than “our” time. Time is a gift, God’s gift, when seen spiritually. It is to be valued and to be used wisely. But to use it wisely, it needs to be valued rightly. Some of us may tend to put time ahead of everything, sacrificing first things for second things on the altar of efficiency, productivity, and achievement. Our impatience may sometimes flare up because we feel we don’t have enough time to do our work. People are always calling on us. Helping others becomes a chore. Yet, we know we are called to serve, and we don’t necessarily get to decide who, when, and under what conditions.
When I was new in the program, I started to make a point of slowing down when I walked. This was very unlike me, and totally counter to my fast-paced, big-city environment and the business I was in at the time. But being sober, I became aware that walking fast and rushing everywhere made me feel agitated and all worked up physically, so that I tended to do everything else fast: talk fast and drive fast and make quick decisions and react quickly and automatically. This helped to shorten an already short fuse, since 25 years of drinking and trying to have it my way left me with a severe anger problem. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the tools to make the change last, and I soon reverted to my old self.
Looking back, I can now see that I was intuitively on the right track. By slowing down I was trying to deal with my (constitutionally) impatient self. But I didn’t know that. At the time, I knew nothing about patience or virtue or practicing any principles or how lasting change actually comes about. Now I understand that slowing down and being patient are two sides of the same coin. So I now try taking my time and slowing my pace when I walk, drive, speak, think, and make decisions. The result is that I am less prone to impatience and less susceptible to anger, in the past one of my defining character traits.
Impatience is experienced as an urge or a desire to hurry things up. Slowing down counters that urge, helping to quiet the mind and the body. It helps to avoid the physiological correlates that poise me for impatience and takes the edge off impulsive speech and action. When I slow down deliberately and intentionally, I increase my ability to respond to situations more consciously and reflectively and less automatically and reflexively.
To practice slowing down with regards to speaking and thinking is to listen more and try to understand better, and not be in a hurry to speak and interrupt people. It is to wait and weigh our words before we respond to a question or statement or to an opinion we might not agree with. Waiting and thinking things through before we talk can make the difference between having a cordial and fruitful discussion and getting into a needless argument, particularly when dealing with sensitive or controversial issues. Sometimes, especially when challenged or provoked, we may slow down to a complete halt and practice patience by holding our peace and practicing silence, quelling the urge to respond instantly and in kind. In slowing down our thinking and giving things due reflection and deliberation, we avoid jumping to conclusions, making hasty judgments and evaluations, and taking ill-considered action.
Slowing down also makes us more aware of bodily expressions of impatience, making it possible to deliberately refrain from indulging them and thus weakening their aggravating effect on the emotion. Instead, we may be able to practice contrary behaviors, such as breathing more deeply and slowly, adopting a sympathetic and understanding expression, or bringing our hands together in a pose characteristic of and conducive to reflection.
When we are prone to impatience with people in particular and not just with a situation in general, we are usually looking at them in terms of some perceived defect. We may find the person slow in performing a task, learning a lesson we are teaching, getting a point we are making, or getting to a point they are trying to make. In these cases, the weight of time is duration. But there are many cases where the burden involves not only extension, but repetition. A sense of “There he goes again” comes over us.
These situations typically involve frequent or repeated contact with the same person. Consider the rooms. Those who are in the habit of going on and rambling way beyond the allotted time may do so again at the next meeting, and at the meeting after that. Those who have a penchant for preaching, lecturing, or saying exactly the same thing over and over again, may continue to do so on every occasion. Those who tend to interject “you know” every other sentence will likely continue to do that every time they speak. In all these cases the repetitive or recurring nature of the behavior adds extra weight to the burden of time.
If we find these behaviors annoying or irritating, a little charity might help. We might consider that those who indulge them are probably not even aware of what they are doing, such being the nature of habit. A little humility might also help. We might consider that there are probably things about us that try other people’s patience, and of which we have no clue.
Situations often call into play more than one virtue, just as they present a temptation to more than one character defect. Defects don’t work in isolation from each other, and neither do the virtues. To be patient we usually have to draw on other virtues which help to foster patience and forestall impatience and related opposite traits.
One of these is acceptance. When I find waiting an unbearable burden, it is often because I find it an unacceptable one. If I accept the burden, then I can bear it. Acceptance gives us the ability to wait for things to take their course and gain perspective on them before we decide on a course of action. It allows time for reflection and takes the edge off impulsivity.
Acceptance furthers patience in as much as in accepting we take things as they are and are not overly concerned with or desirous of changing them. If impatience is wanting X to happen without further delay, then patience is not having that concern or desire, that is, accepting the circumstance as it is. If I accept X, then I’m not impatient for X to cease, though I may very well like it to. If I accept that Y is not yet the case, then I’m not impatient for Y to be, though I would likely welcome it.
Impatience wants a circumstance other than that which obtains. If I accept my loved one as she is, then I am free from feelings of impatience toward her when her shortcomings keep cropping up, or when she regularly displays behavior which I might not find altogether pleasing, because I no longer desire her to be somebody other than who she is.
Gratitude is another aid to patience. In waiting for what we want, gratitude can help us to appreciate and be thankful for what we have, taking the pressure off the waiting. In a traffic jam, we can summons many reasons to be grateful. For some of us that can be something as simple as the fact that we have a car. Not everyone can afford one, and perhaps there was a time when drinking left us so broke that we couldn’t afford one ourselves, or when we couldn’t drive one because a DWI resulted in a suspended license. We may even be grateful that we can drive at all. If we live long enough, the time will come when we won’t even be able to do that. All of this takes a little perspective, but perspective is precisely what we want to cultivate. It helps us to take the long view and not allow the force of the immediate but temporary to blind us to what really matters.
Other virtues can help. Generosity for instance. Generosity is often associated almost exclusively with giving money. But giving of our time and attention to others is one of its highest forms. This is particularly the case when dealing with those who are ill, where patience is most in demand and its value most evident. Then there is faith. I can grow in patience in proportion to my belief that God is in absolute control of my life, of other people, and of circumstances. Things will happen in God’s time, not in mine.
This brings us to two virtues that are close neighbors of patience and with which they are sometimes confused. One is perseverance. The other tolerance.
As with patience, with perseverance time is also the governing factor. But with perseverance, time is not so much a matter of waiting and experiencing a burden. Perseverance is goal-oriented. It is directed toward achieving an objective through continuous, steady effort over the long haul. Here time is our ally, and rather than waiting we are moving and taking action. I persevere by sticking to my course, surmounting obstacles and difficulties and not allowing myself to become discouraged and slacken or abandon my efforts. I persevere until my efforts bear fruit, but I’m not waiting for that eventuality. I’m consistently working toward it. A point may come, however, where progress seems slow and the goal distant. It is then that I have to draw on patience to help me persevere.
As regards tolerance, the governing factor is difference, not time. Tolerance is practiced with regards to perceived differences in people, patience with regards to perceived delay in time. The two may dovetail, which is why they are conflated. A long-winded person may try our patience, but if what he’s being longwinded about reflects a viewpoint we vehemently object to, he will also be trying our tolerance. Someone may say “I have no patience for stupid people” when what they are really saying is that they are intolerant of them. They don’t want to admit to intolerance because it is generally seen as a more objectionable character defect than impatience and is less culturally acceptable. Tolerance is made possible because as we grow spiritually in our recovery we no longer see others as being fundamentally different from us. That can also help us to be patient with them.
To practice a virtue as a virtue then, we have to have a good grasp of what that virtue is, what its opposite vice or defect is, and what other virtues can help to foster the one and discourage the other. We also have to recognize the types of situations which call that virtue forth, so that we can get increasingly better at working the virtue into them. And we have to know what to do and what not to do in those situations. This starts with adjusting our glasses to see the situation through the eyes of the virtue (patience) and not of the character defect (impatience).
Note: The text above is part of a larger post in "Practice These: The Virtue of Patience," in http://PracticeThesePrinciplesTheBook...
November 11, 2013
How Important Is It?
When I became president of my condo association, I started to notice that some neighbors were not particularly neighborly. People would do things like put their garbage outside their door and leave it there for hours before taking it down and depositing in the dumpster. They would hang their doormat to dry on the railing of the catwalk rather than inside their own apartment. They would leave the laundry room door ajar, obstructing the view and blocking passage, and neglect to turn the lights off, costing the association money. They would stamp across the lawn rather than walk on the concrete path, or wade right through the ficus hedge, just to save a few seconds.
Constantly taking note of all these things did not make for a great deal of serenity. It kept me taking people’s inventory, and that made for repeated instances of annoyance, irritation, or just plain displeasure.
I thought it was my job to pay attention to all those things, and to do something about them. After all, I was “the president.” So I would write and post on the building’s bulletin board diplomatically worded notices gently urging people to be, let us say, a little more considerate. Did it do any good? Not at all.
Of course, I practiced surrender and acceptance. I was powerless. Let go and let God. Grant me the serenity. But these things seemed to serve only a remedial function, after a situation presented itself which I wanted and sometimes tried to change but subsequently realized that I could not. The wisdom to know the difference came after the fact. This was huge progress for this alcoholic: there would have been little restraint of tongue and pen otherwise. But I sensed I was missing something. These things were still troubling me. And I didn’t want them to. I wanted peace.
Then one day I came upon a little quote from William James, and I immediately saw the problem. “The art of being wise,” said James, “is knowing what to overlook.” That was it. I was overlooking nothing. I was paying attention to everything. James was suggesting I didn’t have to. Things could be ignored. Wisdom consisted (in part), in knowing which things.
Considered in light of the Serenity Prayer, that didn’t seem to require a great deal of “art.” I already knew that most of the things I could change lay inside of myself and not externally in people, places, and things. I knew that most of the things that people did were outside of my control. Hence, if I couldn’t change them, then it followed that I could ignore them. I could, in fact, overlook most things.
This brought me to a fuller level of acceptance. Serenity was more than accepting people’s offending behavior. It was accepting people. People do what people do, and knowing and accepting that disposes me to accept those things and be ready to overlook them the moment they present themselves. A particular offense is just an instance of something I have already accepted beforehand. I can dismiss it as more of the same.
Besides accepting that people are people and that I’m powerlessness over them, James’ quote helped me to see another reason why most things can be overlooked. They are just not that important. Most of what my neighbors did consisted of minor infractions. They were not of great moment. My wanting to change them lent them an importance they didn’t have. So I stopped wanting. Then I stopped looking. I saw the garbage, and turned my attention to better things.
Back in the mid-'70s, when I was going through yet another crisis and heading toward yet another bottom, I did what someone with my '60s rebel background would say was a very “bourgeois” thing. I went to see a therapist. “How important is it?” was the question Pauline would pose to me again and again as she tried to relieve me of my pain. I had no idea what she was talking about, and I’m not sure she did either. In any case, she didn’t explain, and even if she had I probably wouldn’t have listened. I was, after all, drinking. Thirty-odd years and a lot more pain later, somebody did explain, and I was ready. It was simple. The more importance I attach to something, the more that something is going to affect me emotionally when life happens and things don’t go my way. Give it less importance, and the emotional impact lessens.
We have to reduce the demands we make on ourselves and other people, is the way Bill W. put it. But, of course, we make unreasonable demands because we attach too much importance to things and want them too badly.
Having connected the dots again thanks to James, I came down from my perch as “Chief Inspector” and began to overlook what it was now obvious I ought to overlook. Overlooking things as much as possible has become part of my daily practice of surrender and serenity. I try to take the attitude that most of the things that would bother me if I paid them any mind don’t really matter and are not worth giving my attention to. That applies to lots of things, objectionable or not. I don’t have to make a mental note of every person’s foibles, weak points, mistakes, and errors, much less try to make sure they know I noticed or try to correct them. I can give myself and people a break.
Knowing what to overlook is distinguishing between what’s important and what’s not. Things matter when there’s a question of principle involved. That’s where I have to practice the “art” of wisdom and discern what I can and cannot overlook. But, in everyday life, such situations are rare. When they arise, wisdom begins by seeking God’s will for me in prayer and meditation.
Anything that doesn’t rise to that level is not worth bothering myself or God about. Or anybody else. I can practice peace, calmly overlook the bad, and constructively look for the good and what I can add to it.
Constantly taking note of all these things did not make for a great deal of serenity. It kept me taking people’s inventory, and that made for repeated instances of annoyance, irritation, or just plain displeasure.
I thought it was my job to pay attention to all those things, and to do something about them. After all, I was “the president.” So I would write and post on the building’s bulletin board diplomatically worded notices gently urging people to be, let us say, a little more considerate. Did it do any good? Not at all.
Of course, I practiced surrender and acceptance. I was powerless. Let go and let God. Grant me the serenity. But these things seemed to serve only a remedial function, after a situation presented itself which I wanted and sometimes tried to change but subsequently realized that I could not. The wisdom to know the difference came after the fact. This was huge progress for this alcoholic: there would have been little restraint of tongue and pen otherwise. But I sensed I was missing something. These things were still troubling me. And I didn’t want them to. I wanted peace.
Then one day I came upon a little quote from William James, and I immediately saw the problem. “The art of being wise,” said James, “is knowing what to overlook.” That was it. I was overlooking nothing. I was paying attention to everything. James was suggesting I didn’t have to. Things could be ignored. Wisdom consisted (in part), in knowing which things.
Considered in light of the Serenity Prayer, that didn’t seem to require a great deal of “art.” I already knew that most of the things I could change lay inside of myself and not externally in people, places, and things. I knew that most of the things that people did were outside of my control. Hence, if I couldn’t change them, then it followed that I could ignore them. I could, in fact, overlook most things.
This brought me to a fuller level of acceptance. Serenity was more than accepting people’s offending behavior. It was accepting people. People do what people do, and knowing and accepting that disposes me to accept those things and be ready to overlook them the moment they present themselves. A particular offense is just an instance of something I have already accepted beforehand. I can dismiss it as more of the same.
Besides accepting that people are people and that I’m powerlessness over them, James’ quote helped me to see another reason why most things can be overlooked. They are just not that important. Most of what my neighbors did consisted of minor infractions. They were not of great moment. My wanting to change them lent them an importance they didn’t have. So I stopped wanting. Then I stopped looking. I saw the garbage, and turned my attention to better things.
Back in the mid-'70s, when I was going through yet another crisis and heading toward yet another bottom, I did what someone with my '60s rebel background would say was a very “bourgeois” thing. I went to see a therapist. “How important is it?” was the question Pauline would pose to me again and again as she tried to relieve me of my pain. I had no idea what she was talking about, and I’m not sure she did either. In any case, she didn’t explain, and even if she had I probably wouldn’t have listened. I was, after all, drinking. Thirty-odd years and a lot more pain later, somebody did explain, and I was ready. It was simple. The more importance I attach to something, the more that something is going to affect me emotionally when life happens and things don’t go my way. Give it less importance, and the emotional impact lessens.
We have to reduce the demands we make on ourselves and other people, is the way Bill W. put it. But, of course, we make unreasonable demands because we attach too much importance to things and want them too badly.
Having connected the dots again thanks to James, I came down from my perch as “Chief Inspector” and began to overlook what it was now obvious I ought to overlook. Overlooking things as much as possible has become part of my daily practice of surrender and serenity. I try to take the attitude that most of the things that would bother me if I paid them any mind don’t really matter and are not worth giving my attention to. That applies to lots of things, objectionable or not. I don’t have to make a mental note of every person’s foibles, weak points, mistakes, and errors, much less try to make sure they know I noticed or try to correct them. I can give myself and people a break.
Knowing what to overlook is distinguishing between what’s important and what’s not. Things matter when there’s a question of principle involved. That’s where I have to practice the “art” of wisdom and discern what I can and cannot overlook. But, in everyday life, such situations are rare. When they arise, wisdom begins by seeking God’s will for me in prayer and meditation.
Anything that doesn’t rise to that level is not worth bothering myself or God about. Or anybody else. I can practice peace, calmly overlook the bad, and constructively look for the good and what I can add to it.
October 5, 2013
The Slogans of Step 3
Samuel Johnson once remarked that we need to be reminded more frequently than we need to be instructed. Unless sufficiently repeated, much information is not assimilated and transformed into knowledge. Still more repetition, reminding, and related processes like reflection are necessary to translate knowledge into understanding, and more still to translate understanding into acquired skills and habits that can have a consistent practical impact on what we do with what we’ve learned.
This is no less true for those of us in recovery. We go to meetings to keep the memory green because like everybody else we tend to forget—except that in our case we can’t afford to forget. We go to meetings to remind ourselves of what it was like and what happened because we need to hear over and over again what it means to be an alcoholic. And we go to meetings to remind ourselves of the ideas that got us sober and that can keep us growing in sobriety if we keep putting them to work in more and more areas of our lives.
These ideas are essentially in the nature of principles, and just as they are embedded in the Steps, we will find many of them also embedded in another set of tools closely linked to the Steps. These are the slogans, sometimes also referred to as sayings, maxims, and mottoes. In AA, more of these sayings are built around Step 3 than around all the other Steps combined. This in itself is indicative of the pivotal role of this Step. These slogans help to remind us of our decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, and to put it into practice in concrete ways as we face the challenges of daily living.
We have come across some of these slogans in our discussion of the Step in Practice These Principles. They all have surrender and humility as their foundational principles, with the other principles of Step 3 more operational in some than in others. Thus trust, acceptance and serenity are at the heart of such slogans as “Turn it over,” “Let go and let God,” and “Take the action and let go of the results.” Slogans such as “This too shall pass,” “No pain, no gain,” and “Live and let live” stress acceptance in particular. Similar principles underlie such sayings as “God will never give you more than you can handle,” “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be,” and “You get what you need, not what you want.”
How the principles of Step 3 are at work in a few other slogans may be less obvious. “Easy does it,” “One day at a time,” and “Put one foot in front of another” are calls for slowing down, being patient, and waiting on God, rather than acting on impulse or being driven by anxiety or by a sense of urgency or passionate intensity to grab the bull by the horns, impose our will, and force things to happen. This is in no way to sanction passivity, sloth, or procrastination, as the slogans “Easy does it but do it” and “Easy does it does it best” remind us: we are practicing a faith that works; we have to trust and act.
Slogans such as “Act as if,” “Take the action and the feelings will follow,” and “Bring your body and the mind will follow,” serve to remind us that our recovery is a joint enterprise with God: if we humble and surrender ourselves and sincerely seek to do his will, God will bring our feelings in line with our actions, renew our mind, and transform our character.
The saying “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is a call to simplicity but it also tells us to let things be and not try to control and change them to suit our perfectionist and self-serving specifications. “Compare and despair” tells us to accept ourselves as we are and other people as they are, lest we succumb to pride, at times feeling superior and at times inferior to others.
“But for the grace of God” serves to foster the emotion of gratitude and to practice it as a virtue, but as regards Step 3 it is also a reminder of our humble dependence on God’s providence. “Without God I can’t; without me He won’t” contains in its simplicity the paradox of our relationship with God and goes to the heart of Step 3. We are dependent but not determined. God will not impose. Grace is freely given and freely received. We open ourselves to receive it by becoming willing.
We use these slogans when under emotional stress much the same way we use the Serenity Prayer, reminding ourselves of the principles we want to practice and asking for help to do it. Calling a slogan to mind can instantly effectuate an attitude adjustment in such situations, enabling us to adopt a spiritual perspective, put the brakes on a reflexive fight-or-flight response, and fend off our natural tendency toward self-centeredness and self will.
When we feel overwhelmed by a task that seems beyond our capacity to accomplish, it helps to remind ourselves to take it one day at a time and to put one foot in front of another, so that we keep moving in the right direction rather than quit or allow ourselves to become paralyzed. If we are obsessing over a problem we can’t solve at the moment, reminding ourselves to turn it over will allow for an answer to present itself in due course. When defeat and failure seem too heavy to bear, we can remember that this too shall pass, because that is in fact the way the world works: everything passes. When anger, fear, and resentment rob us of the joy of living, reminding ourselves to let go and let God can help us to surrender our will and in so doing regain our own lives.
Some might thumb their nose at the slogans, but Samuel Johnson would approve. They are catchy and easy to remember and as such good reminders. Yet they are not vacuous. They embody life-saving principles. And they work.
This is no less true for those of us in recovery. We go to meetings to keep the memory green because like everybody else we tend to forget—except that in our case we can’t afford to forget. We go to meetings to remind ourselves of what it was like and what happened because we need to hear over and over again what it means to be an alcoholic. And we go to meetings to remind ourselves of the ideas that got us sober and that can keep us growing in sobriety if we keep putting them to work in more and more areas of our lives.
These ideas are essentially in the nature of principles, and just as they are embedded in the Steps, we will find many of them also embedded in another set of tools closely linked to the Steps. These are the slogans, sometimes also referred to as sayings, maxims, and mottoes. In AA, more of these sayings are built around Step 3 than around all the other Steps combined. This in itself is indicative of the pivotal role of this Step. These slogans help to remind us of our decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, and to put it into practice in concrete ways as we face the challenges of daily living.
We have come across some of these slogans in our discussion of the Step in Practice These Principles. They all have surrender and humility as their foundational principles, with the other principles of Step 3 more operational in some than in others. Thus trust, acceptance and serenity are at the heart of such slogans as “Turn it over,” “Let go and let God,” and “Take the action and let go of the results.” Slogans such as “This too shall pass,” “No pain, no gain,” and “Live and let live” stress acceptance in particular. Similar principles underlie such sayings as “God will never give you more than you can handle,” “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be,” and “You get what you need, not what you want.”
How the principles of Step 3 are at work in a few other slogans may be less obvious. “Easy does it,” “One day at a time,” and “Put one foot in front of another” are calls for slowing down, being patient, and waiting on God, rather than acting on impulse or being driven by anxiety or by a sense of urgency or passionate intensity to grab the bull by the horns, impose our will, and force things to happen. This is in no way to sanction passivity, sloth, or procrastination, as the slogans “Easy does it but do it” and “Easy does it does it best” remind us: we are practicing a faith that works; we have to trust and act.
Slogans such as “Act as if,” “Take the action and the feelings will follow,” and “Bring your body and the mind will follow,” serve to remind us that our recovery is a joint enterprise with God: if we humble and surrender ourselves and sincerely seek to do his will, God will bring our feelings in line with our actions, renew our mind, and transform our character.
The saying “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” is a call to simplicity but it also tells us to let things be and not try to control and change them to suit our perfectionist and self-serving specifications. “Compare and despair” tells us to accept ourselves as we are and other people as they are, lest we succumb to pride, at times feeling superior and at times inferior to others.
“But for the grace of God” serves to foster the emotion of gratitude and to practice it as a virtue, but as regards Step 3 it is also a reminder of our humble dependence on God’s providence. “Without God I can’t; without me He won’t” contains in its simplicity the paradox of our relationship with God and goes to the heart of Step 3. We are dependent but not determined. God will not impose. Grace is freely given and freely received. We open ourselves to receive it by becoming willing.
We use these slogans when under emotional stress much the same way we use the Serenity Prayer, reminding ourselves of the principles we want to practice and asking for help to do it. Calling a slogan to mind can instantly effectuate an attitude adjustment in such situations, enabling us to adopt a spiritual perspective, put the brakes on a reflexive fight-or-flight response, and fend off our natural tendency toward self-centeredness and self will.
When we feel overwhelmed by a task that seems beyond our capacity to accomplish, it helps to remind ourselves to take it one day at a time and to put one foot in front of another, so that we keep moving in the right direction rather than quit or allow ourselves to become paralyzed. If we are obsessing over a problem we can’t solve at the moment, reminding ourselves to turn it over will allow for an answer to present itself in due course. When defeat and failure seem too heavy to bear, we can remember that this too shall pass, because that is in fact the way the world works: everything passes. When anger, fear, and resentment rob us of the joy of living, reminding ourselves to let go and let God can help us to surrender our will and in so doing regain our own lives.
Some might thumb their nose at the slogans, but Samuel Johnson would approve. They are catchy and easy to remember and as such good reminders. Yet they are not vacuous. They embody life-saving principles. And they work.
September 1, 2013
Keep the Memory Green
I’m at the airport waiting for a friend who’s arriving in JetBlue flight number 141 from Newark. Time of arrival is 5:57 p.m. I check the electronic board and it shows the flight’s on time. I go back and sit down. A man sitting with some friends behind me walks to the board, comes back, and declares with a slight tone of irritation: “I don’t know how they can say it’s on time when it was supposed to arrive at 5:57.” I check my watch. It’s 5:59. I look at the man again and I think: “there but for the grace of God.” That man was me, not that very long ago. Not that I was a little more patient now, though AA had taught me that. But that I could now see. In the larger scheme of things, a routine delay in a flight’s scheduled arrival was of absolutely no importance. Especially not after the bleak events of one perversely bright September morning such a short time ago, when four flights never arrived at all. It’s so easy to forget. Keep the memory green, we say in the rooms. It helps to keep us grateful.
July 14, 2013
Second Thoughts: Decisions, Reason, and Emotion
It sometimes happens that we make a major decision and then we begin to doubt ourselves. Are we doing the right thing? Maybe we need to reconsider. We go back over the reasons why we made the decision and they all seem to be good. Yet we’re still not sure. We feel conflicted. We wonder if we’re making a mistake.
Anonymous Ann is in such a situation. She makes a decision to sell her apartment and move back up North. This after nine years of living in relative happiness in a retirement community in the South. But she’s been living alone all this time and, as she moves further into the “aging and ailing” stage of life, she thinks she ought to be near family. She’s thought about it at length, considered all the pros and cons, prayed for guidance, and discussed it with friends and relatives, all of whom agree she’s doing the right thing.
Despite all of this, however, Ann keeps having second thoughts, and she finds her indecision unsettling. She remembers how easy it was to make decisions when she drank. Not the stable sort, she made lots of changes, always involving her external circumstances and usually prodded by anger, fear, resentment, depression, and other troubled emotions. She was decisive, but hardly wise. Since she now has double-digit sobriety and has gained a good handle on her emotions, Ann thought she should be able to decide things more rationally, and should therefore feel pretty confident about her decision to move.
But she didn't. As she studied and pondered the matter, Ann made an interesting discovery: being more rational doesn’t necessarily mean being more certain. The opposite may actually be the case. There’s a psychological explanation for this: reason is not a good motivator of action. We may have perfectly rational grounds for deciding to do something, but reason itself will not move us to act. To move, we need to be moved.
Even when we are trying to be rational, the moving force behind the decisions we make is less likely to be reason than emotion. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the impulse to make a decision and to act on it, and the fewer and weaker the doubts. Conversely, the weaker the emotions, the greater the tendency to hesitate and waver as we try to decide on primarily rational grounds and “analysis paralysis” sets in.
This is what happened to Ann. Her reasoning was strong, but her emotions weak. Weak, but not absent. Contrary to what she had first believed, her decision was not purely rational. Emotion had been a factor all along. Her initial thinking about moving was prompted by recent (though not overly serious) health problems. This had naturally raised some fear about growing older and getting sick and being all alone and away from family.
A little anger had also played a role. She held a responsible position in her condo association and had experienced first-hand the meaning of the old saying that “no good deed goes unpunished.” Though she had made progress tempering her anger, situations arose when it still got the better of her. And when it did, a geographic seemed like a natural option. It was the flight response at work, caused not by fear but by a sort of low-level, slightly retaliatory resentment which said: To hell with it all, I’m out of here.
But because the emotions underlying her decision lacked force, they fluctuated and ran up against each other. When her fear of illness subsided, or her memory of a neighbor’s contentiousness at a meeting blurred, she didn’t feel that strongly about moving. At such moments, other emotions would surface which would make her question her judgment. She would worry about the winters up North, or about not being able to afford the high cost of living there, or about becoming dependent on relatives.
She would then recall all the good reasons she had for moving south in the first place, the proximity of the beach not being the least. But then a neighbor would act up again, or another slightly worrisome test result – or a friend’s death – would remind her once more of her mortality, and the emotional pendulum would swing in the opposite direction. And so it would go. No one emotion was powerful enough to overcome and exclude the other.
Ann was not exactly wracked with conflict, because her feelings were not sufficiently strong to have that effect. But she lacked the certainty she desired. She would find herself having to fall back upon reason to tame her doubts and keep propping up what she knew was a right decision.
“In this world, second thoughts, it seems, are best,” Euripides is reported to have said. Whether best or not, they are often inevitable. Our desire for certainty in decision-making is understandable, but not always achievable. Any decision we make that affects something of sufficient value to us may bring a feeling of uncertainty with it.
For a long time (at least since the time of Plato), it was thought that reason and emotion were separate faculties, that we had two selves, one rational, the other emotional, and that all our problems arose from the metaphorical heart, which should therefore be under the control of the metaphorical head.
As Bill W. shows in his article on emotional sobriety, it doesn’t quite seem to work out that way. Modern thought and neuroscience are with him on this. Reason and emotion function together. The power of the one over the other is limited. Reason may guide, but it doesn’t move. And because we need to move, we need to act upon the world, the emotions are essential. They cannot be excluded from the decisions and the choices that we make. Contrary to the saying we sometimes hear in the rooms, feelings are definitely facts. But we may get the facts wrong.
Wisdom helps to get them right. Wisdom is the character trait or virtue which governs right decision, and it partakes of emotion no less than of reason, harmonizing the two and allowing us to decide and to act rightly.
This, Ann was doing her best to practice, even if she was not always conscious of all its ramifications. She had come to see what was really important in life and had made an accurate assessment of her situation. These are both central aspects of wisdom. While she had other concerns, other things which had meaning or value for her, she was able to order these things rightly and thus diminish the tension between them. Health and family came first. She took the time to reflect, considered the possible consequences of her move, allowed herself to experience the various emotions which resulted from shifting perspectives and concerns, and openly sought advice.
But wisdom is no guarantee of certainty either. In fact, knowing and accepting the inevitability of uncertainty is in itself an expression of wisdom. Conflicts and doubts cannot always be resolved. Having ascertained to the best of our ability that in making our decision we are seeing things rightly and properly ordering our concerns, there’s nothing left to do but to practice Step 3 and turn the matter over. Being human, we can’t know for sure. Hence wisdom calls for humility and surrender. Thy will, not mine, be done.
Anonymous Ann is in such a situation. She makes a decision to sell her apartment and move back up North. This after nine years of living in relative happiness in a retirement community in the South. But she’s been living alone all this time and, as she moves further into the “aging and ailing” stage of life, she thinks she ought to be near family. She’s thought about it at length, considered all the pros and cons, prayed for guidance, and discussed it with friends and relatives, all of whom agree she’s doing the right thing.
Despite all of this, however, Ann keeps having second thoughts, and she finds her indecision unsettling. She remembers how easy it was to make decisions when she drank. Not the stable sort, she made lots of changes, always involving her external circumstances and usually prodded by anger, fear, resentment, depression, and other troubled emotions. She was decisive, but hardly wise. Since she now has double-digit sobriety and has gained a good handle on her emotions, Ann thought she should be able to decide things more rationally, and should therefore feel pretty confident about her decision to move.
But she didn't. As she studied and pondered the matter, Ann made an interesting discovery: being more rational doesn’t necessarily mean being more certain. The opposite may actually be the case. There’s a psychological explanation for this: reason is not a good motivator of action. We may have perfectly rational grounds for deciding to do something, but reason itself will not move us to act. To move, we need to be moved.
Even when we are trying to be rational, the moving force behind the decisions we make is less likely to be reason than emotion. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the impulse to make a decision and to act on it, and the fewer and weaker the doubts. Conversely, the weaker the emotions, the greater the tendency to hesitate and waver as we try to decide on primarily rational grounds and “analysis paralysis” sets in.
This is what happened to Ann. Her reasoning was strong, but her emotions weak. Weak, but not absent. Contrary to what she had first believed, her decision was not purely rational. Emotion had been a factor all along. Her initial thinking about moving was prompted by recent (though not overly serious) health problems. This had naturally raised some fear about growing older and getting sick and being all alone and away from family.
A little anger had also played a role. She held a responsible position in her condo association and had experienced first-hand the meaning of the old saying that “no good deed goes unpunished.” Though she had made progress tempering her anger, situations arose when it still got the better of her. And when it did, a geographic seemed like a natural option. It was the flight response at work, caused not by fear but by a sort of low-level, slightly retaliatory resentment which said: To hell with it all, I’m out of here.
But because the emotions underlying her decision lacked force, they fluctuated and ran up against each other. When her fear of illness subsided, or her memory of a neighbor’s contentiousness at a meeting blurred, she didn’t feel that strongly about moving. At such moments, other emotions would surface which would make her question her judgment. She would worry about the winters up North, or about not being able to afford the high cost of living there, or about becoming dependent on relatives.
She would then recall all the good reasons she had for moving south in the first place, the proximity of the beach not being the least. But then a neighbor would act up again, or another slightly worrisome test result – or a friend’s death – would remind her once more of her mortality, and the emotional pendulum would swing in the opposite direction. And so it would go. No one emotion was powerful enough to overcome and exclude the other.
Ann was not exactly wracked with conflict, because her feelings were not sufficiently strong to have that effect. But she lacked the certainty she desired. She would find herself having to fall back upon reason to tame her doubts and keep propping up what she knew was a right decision.
“In this world, second thoughts, it seems, are best,” Euripides is reported to have said. Whether best or not, they are often inevitable. Our desire for certainty in decision-making is understandable, but not always achievable. Any decision we make that affects something of sufficient value to us may bring a feeling of uncertainty with it.
For a long time (at least since the time of Plato), it was thought that reason and emotion were separate faculties, that we had two selves, one rational, the other emotional, and that all our problems arose from the metaphorical heart, which should therefore be under the control of the metaphorical head.
As Bill W. shows in his article on emotional sobriety, it doesn’t quite seem to work out that way. Modern thought and neuroscience are with him on this. Reason and emotion function together. The power of the one over the other is limited. Reason may guide, but it doesn’t move. And because we need to move, we need to act upon the world, the emotions are essential. They cannot be excluded from the decisions and the choices that we make. Contrary to the saying we sometimes hear in the rooms, feelings are definitely facts. But we may get the facts wrong.
Wisdom helps to get them right. Wisdom is the character trait or virtue which governs right decision, and it partakes of emotion no less than of reason, harmonizing the two and allowing us to decide and to act rightly.
This, Ann was doing her best to practice, even if she was not always conscious of all its ramifications. She had come to see what was really important in life and had made an accurate assessment of her situation. These are both central aspects of wisdom. While she had other concerns, other things which had meaning or value for her, she was able to order these things rightly and thus diminish the tension between them. Health and family came first. She took the time to reflect, considered the possible consequences of her move, allowed herself to experience the various emotions which resulted from shifting perspectives and concerns, and openly sought advice.
But wisdom is no guarantee of certainty either. In fact, knowing and accepting the inevitability of uncertainty is in itself an expression of wisdom. Conflicts and doubts cannot always be resolved. Having ascertained to the best of our ability that in making our decision we are seeing things rightly and properly ordering our concerns, there’s nothing left to do but to practice Step 3 and turn the matter over. Being human, we can’t know for sure. Hence wisdom calls for humility and surrender. Thy will, not mine, be done.
