Alcoholics Anonymous Blog & Video | May 17 2014 | DonInLondon
There is a big difference between feeling and thinking. Feelings are natural instincts about what is happening now, what has happened in the past, and the consequences of our feelings about situations impact on the future and our direction. Feelings are the start. In the process of actions we take, feelings are in the moment, and then we think about what we do, the consequences of our thinking which might seem instantaneous lead to actions. Feeling, then thinking and then action. If we don't feel any hunger, any anger, or lonely or tired, feelings are likely to lead to happy thinking and then happy actions. If we are hungry, angry, lonely and tired, our feelings are unhappy and this leads to unhappy actions, and in the moment, anger and rage will turn a good situation bad.
The longer families live in a situation of hunger, anger, isolation and exhaustion, the more likely it is that everyone is impacted in a negative way. Where is tolerance and love when the chips are down? As individuals, families, communities and the bigger society find themselves in depression, the more likely humanity blots out the truth on a daily basis, and the daily grind, the consequences can take generations to heal.
I can remember a particularly bad year in my upbringing and a change of government in 1979, I had been brought up to believe that socialist and Labour Party people were right for government. And when in 1979, Margaret Thatcher came to power, I was at university, or what we used to call polytechnics, and it was a good reason to get drunk, and stay drunk for the duration of my time pursuing a degree. I did get an honours degree, had an uproarious three years of self-indulgence and studied enough to come through. If ever higher education could awarded a degree for licentious behaviour, I'm sure I would have been awarded a first, rather than an honours degree without much distinction.
Would it have been better if the Labour government had stayed in power during those years? Maybe I would have felt more secure in my licentious three years, but I felt it was a good risk to enjoy the full and natural obligation to be rebellious, out of order, and always the last man standing at the profligate and debauched goings-on in student life. Tolerance and love for all mankind, my generation, just behind flower power, most of us missed the pot, and all the drugs, which then became natural in generations to come. Thatcher took the lid off family, community and a sense of duty, even though she herself was bound by such values except one, that capitalism was best. I saw it create the worst in even the best people, and even me as we worked hard and played harder.
Anywhere I going with this? Simply, this notion that tolerance and love is far better than anger and resentment. Those who make it into recovery, usually angry and resentful at the world, stuck with a disease which we can deny until the game is up. And then, finding the truth of now, and living in the truth of now, and speaking our truth in the now becomes more agreeable. In accepting the truth of now, there is acceptance of true feelings in the moment. We don't deny anger and resentment, and most often we don't get to anger and resentment, unless somebody pokes us with a stick. And even then, we can turn the other cheek, and realise just how easy we could become the owner of the stick poking others with our rhetoric and damning words. Not easy to live in recovery? Yes it is, because the more we tell the truth, the less we suffer in the long-run.
Step Five Video 12 And 12
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