I am grateful for my sobriety--everyday and especially today.
I dropped a friend off at a detox facility today. She is so addicted on alcohol that she gets sick if she does not drink every few hours. At that level of alcohol addiction, it is important to have medical supervision when quitting drinking. Alcohol is the one drug that kills people when they stop cold turkey.
My friend walked out of the detox facility after an hour because an intake staff member said things she did not want to hear aka “he was mean to her”. I wish I could make my friend get sober. Unfortunately, she is the only one that has the power to get her sober. To date, she has been unwilling to follow good orderly directions. She is a great example of self-will run riot. She knows that she will die a premature painful lonely death if she continues to drink.
I don't know what 'it' is that separates those of us that are sober from those that continue to use. All alcoholics have a hard time with directions and authority. Willingness is vital to sobriety. In the 12-step paradigm, it is being willing to go to meetings, get a sponsor, work the steps and help others. Whatever that special 'it' is, I have been blessed to have it for all but a week of the last 11 years and almost six years of continuous sobriety.
I am grateful for my sobriety.
My father was a good provider and a hard worker. He missed work twice in 33 years working as a pilot for Pan Am Airlines from 1945 t0o 1978.
He taught me many valuable skills such as welding, operating heavy equipment and fishing. We had some incredible father-son misadventures together. He certainly spent a lot of time with me when I was a teenager.
In the end, we were estranged when he died 17 years ago. I am grateful to him for all the good things he taught me in life.
Writing this blog about gratitude is one of the best things that I have done for my mental health in my life. Since I started 10 weeks ago all my relationships have gotten and I have a fantastic level of peace & serenity that comes from me being okay with my life.
I have the opportunity to search through 1200 short articles on Gratitude by some incredibly grateful people to pick about 30 of the best ones as a suggestion for a compilation book. How cool is that? Even my homework is to research gratitude!
Words are not flowing off my fingers tonight for this post. Nonetheless, I have tremendous inner peace and a strong sense of security/determination that I am headed in the right direction with my life.
I will sign off now to spend the $30 to get access to the 1200 articles on gratitude. Time to start research of my favorite kind—reading and bookmarking!
At 47 degrees North, daylight hours in Seattle vary between 8 in December to 16 hours in June. Combined with a seemingly perpetual overcast, the limited daylight makes for dark and dreary winters. By the time my birthday rolls around in early March, the days are getting longer by 3 minutes & 20+ seconds for the next 6 weeks. We get nearly 3 hours more daylight from March 1 to April 30.
I love it as the days get longer knowing that spring and summer will last until the Fall. Okay, that was stating the blindingly obvious, but I do relish in my numerology (my favorite word to misuse) of knowing it will be warmer and sunnier for the next six months.
One astronomical oddity is that on March 18th, we will have 12 hours 2 minutes of daylight and yet the Spring equinox is not until March 20th at 7:21 EDT. Seems like the equinox ought to be on the 18th. Further wiki research reveals the reason for that.
| Equilux:
1. the Sun appears as a disk in the sky with a radius of around 16 arcminutes, and so the top of the Sun appears to rise while the centre of the disk is still below the horizon, and the instant of the equinox is measured with respect to the Sun’s centre, and; 2. the Sun’s light is bent, or refracted, in the Earth’s atmosphere, so that rays from the Sun can light you up even before the Sun rises, and keep you lit after it sets, with the degree of refaction being around 34 arcminutes. These two factors combine to mean that the Sun will appear to have “risen” when the centre of the disk is still 50 arcminutes (16 + 34) below the horizon, making the amount of daylight longer than the expected 12 hours. How much longer depends on where on Earth you are. For example, in the UK the length of the day is approx. 12 hours 10 minutes, rather than exactly 12 hours. |
I am grateful for more daylight hours and warmer days!
Before recovery, all of my adult life was spent living in the future as in 'someday I am going to be...happy, wealthy, successful, etc'. My past was too painful to spend much time in. There was never 'enough' while in the present moment.
Over time as my age and addictions progressed, the future could no longer be sugar-coated to be anything other than Hobbesian— solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
It has taken years of recovery, therapy, mediation and other self-improvement methods for me to spend my days living in the present. One statement about the present is that it is a gift. The real blessing of living in the present for me is the gift of serenity. Taken individually, each of my days are good.
When I get sucked into doing some sort of life-evaluation, then my life and days come up short since I should clearly have and be so much more than what I have and am today. The slogan for that kind thinking is don't should've on yourself.
Had a good day today. Gave my roommate's daughter Leah a ride to the airport. Lisa P took me shooting pistols at Wade's Gun Club in Bellevue. Took Lisa to a great lunch at Ruth's Chris along with a walk around Bellevue Square. Went to a different 12-step organization meeting tonight.
I committed myself to blogging 5x/week about gratitude this year. For the first time this year, I am not going to be complete this week with my 5x posts. That is a lot of progress on how I show up in my life and with my commitments.
I had a great birthday weekend am very pleased with having lived long enough to be 52 years old.
I am grateful for being older, wiser and having serenity & sobriety in my life today.
Public water supplies in the Seattle area are excellent. We have soft water with little mineral content that is delivered right to our tap on a gravity feed system from reservoirs in the Cascade mountains located 20-30 miles east of Seattle. I drink the local tap water with no hesitations. I know we have an abundant supply of clean filtered water that has been treated to remove kill any bugs that might have been in the water supply. The watersheds that feed into the reservoirs are off-limits to most public access. Logging is strictly regulated to keep dirt and debris out of the tributary streams. I love having all the clean water I need on demand for drinking, bathing and cleaning. The lush vegetation in Western Washington is a bonus from all that water.
From http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/four_ways_to_give_thanks/
Research in positive psychology has identified several ways that practicing gratitude can boost people’s health and happiness. Here are four of these research-tested “gratitude interventions.”
1. Write a gratitude letter. Research by Martin Seligman, Christopher Peterson, and others has shown this one to be particularly effective. Write a letter to a mentor, family member, or some other important person in your life whom you’ve never properly thanked. Deliver it in person. Read it out loud. Bring tissues.
2. Keep a gratitude journal. Studies by psychologists Michael McCullough, Robert Emmons, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and others have backed up this exercise, which involves keeping a list of things for which you’re grateful—anything from your children or spouse to the beauty of the tree outside your window. Doing so helps you focus on the positive things in your life—a practice that’s been shown to increase happiness.
3. Savor. Take the time to notice beauty and pleasures in your daily life. Loyola University psychologist Fred Bryant has shown that savoring positive experiences can heighten your positive responses to them. A key to savoring is what Bryant calls “thanksgiving,” or expressing gratitude for the blessings that come your way, large and small.
4. Think outside the box. It’s fairly obvious why we might feel grateful for grandmothers, lovely sunsets, and anything else that has provided comfort or beauty in our lives. But what about thanking the homeless people who come to the shelter where you volunteer? “Individuals who do volunteer work sometimes speak of the benefits they receive from service,” writes Robert Emmons in his forthcoming book, Thanks! “Since service to others helped them to find their own inner spirituality, they were grateful for the opportunity to serve.” If we look hard enough, he argues, we can find a reason to feel grateful for any relationship—even when someone does us harm, as that person helps us appreciate our own vulnerability. Emmons claims that such highly advanced forms of gratitude may actually increase the level of goodness in the world by inspiring positive acts in ourselves and others.
