Experience – Knowledge – Wisdom – Virtue

Like all of us, I had many experiences in my life.  I diverged from most others by not being able to put that experience to good use creating knowledge of what did and did not help me get what I wanted in a socially, mentally and physically healthy way.  In recovery, I have made tremendous progress turning my experiences into knowledge by hearing the wisdom of others who learned better after having similar experiences.

Today the challenge in my life is living with virtue—the action of doing what I know to be the right thing.  There are many simple nuances that still escape me.  Reducing my choices to their essential simplicity helps me do a better job of taking right action.  Choices like “should I smoke crack or go to a meeting” eliminate a lot of ambiguity in my Pisces mind that likes to complicate everything with my own best thinking.

While my thinking and actions are far from perfect and maybe not even all that close to very good, it is a lot better today than how it used to be.  Nurturing myself with self-compassion helps me to focus on the positive while reducing obsessive thinking on the negative thoughts that reduce the quality of my life.  Self-compassion also helps me relate to and have compassion for others.  I watch others making choices and taking actions that are well below sub-optimal ranging from poor to bad to horrible to catastrophic and know but there for the grace of god, go I.

I have long believed that people always make the best choice they can with the resources they have at the time.  These are all too often horrible choices such as living in active addiction, violence, suicide and so on, but it is the best choice they could make at the time.  Maybe the best thing I can now to help others is to help minimize the impact of poor choices.  A few self-destructive moments, comments and actions no longer have to be a potential death sentence with the Russian roulette of relapse.

I am grateful for the virtue in my right actions today and for the compassion I have for myself and others.  I thank god for my spirituality, friends and others that help me live a much more virtuous life today with much more right action and less obsessive negative thinking and self-destructive actions.