Getting Sober, I See People Who Just Got Smarter!
Mark Twain wrote, “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
When I got sober, one benefit I discovered was how many people seemed to get smarter. Maybe I had been too quick to find fault with them over the years.
I wish I’d wised up sooner. Because of the problems with which my parents struggled, I made assumptions about their competence, and characters, as only someone can who has yet to learn lessons in life’s school of hard knocks. By age 21, I was the equivalent of a pre-schooler, I am sorry to say!
I’m to Love Gray
Finally, I beginning to understand that people can make decisions, take actions, speak their minds, and they are not necessarily stupid. Call it a graying of my world view, if you will, that is surprising me, who reacted as if so many things in life were either black or white.
I heard in a meeting recently an AA speak of their parents with compassion: they did they best they could with the tools they had.
Still, I can fail to remember many troubled souls, whether from addictions, compulsions, mental illnesses or plain old orneriness, do not have a way out of their of their pain that we have who are working on our programs. AA is, after all, a fairly recent gift on the world’s calendar of “cures.”
Taking other people’s inventory is not my right, or duty.
Learning from other people’s mistakes is a privilege – not a task to correct them.
- Serenity isn’t a synonym for brain dead; it is an attitude based on the belief, I am not in charge of anybody’s life but my own; it is also an attitude that needs daily attention, because of my character defects.
- Serenity doesn’t close my eyes to troubles, it is an attitude by which I may trust the God who has done so much for me, will do for others, what I can’t.
- Serenity teaches: Practice the same kind of compassion I so want, towards those who are driving me nuts!
We are always in the forge, or on the anvil; by trials, God is shaping us for higher things. — Henry Ward Beecher
- Image taken from Pinterest: AA Slogans
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