The Reboot

A New Morning.

No matter what yesterday brought or even all the yesterday's before yesterday, we have a new chance every day to make things different, to take different paths, to make other decisions. 

There is no ground hogs day curse. We are not doomed to relive the same day over and over again without hope of a different out come. 

Every morning, as the light breaks across the eastern sky, we have the choice of saying, this day will be different. In fact we have no choice but to make a decision every day, we have to chose who we will serve, who we will honor, who we will remember. That is how it is. It is neither good or bad in itself. It was was we chose that day, or this day, that well make all of the difference. 

As a Benedictine, we are comforted over and over again with this:

Always, we begin again. 

Reduced to Zero - God will reduce to zero those whom he chooses to use.

Nothing, of course, could be considered to be a synonym of zero and zero is the point of my attempt at re-genesis or, in more modern vernacular,  a complete system reboot. I have been living caught in the space between how most of the world sees me, or, more likely, how I think most of the world sees me and how I am actually am at home where wholeness of person really matters most. 

For 11 years I have operated under the delusion that recovery of alcoholism is all that was really need because everything else, personality wise, would fall into place. I would embrace the 9th step promises and life in a world of happy, happy, joy, joy ever more. The truth is alcoholism was really just an open and obvious expression of a far deeper problem that was only covered over by recovery. Don't misunderstand, alcoholism was literally killing me and it had to be addressed. It was killing me physically, killing my relationships, killing my sense of worth and ability to function in the world. It had to be addressed or else nothing else would have mattered.

What has happened since I began recovery is really a conundrum. There have been many great blessings but also many great sorrows. There has been countless efforts to continue recovery but using the word recovery is really misleading because it implies there was something of value that was lost to begin with. At this point and in this place I am not recovering anything, I am growing new things that were promised but were never planted.

From the perspective of alcoholism, my recovery is complete. Now comes the hard part. To borrow the analogy of agriculture, it is time to clear the land, pick the rocks, break the soil, eradicate the weeds, fertilize the soil, plant the seeds of purpose filled life and the nourish whatever grows in this garden God has in mind for me. At this time I am doing the preparation work to begin the process. I am measuring the plot and determining what tools I need to use and where to start.

Knowing myself and my tendencies, I can't allow myself to stall out in the planning and miss the time to plant by mistaking planning for actual production.

This is minus three days to the full system reboot. With these words, I am taking the first steps toward pushing the power off button.