Better bend than break.
~ Scottish proverb ~
At times, we need to take a stand. But there will be more times when we’ll need to bend. Bending means listening to other opinions. Often, we just react instead of listening. Bending means remembering what’s really important. Often, we get stubborn just to prove a point. Bending means knowing that, most often, the relationship is more important than the point we want to prove.
Bending is about letting go. Often, what we need to let go of is our self-will. If we live only by self-will, we’ll eventually break. Self-will is as fragile as fine china. We need to be more like Tupperware than fine china—we’ll last longer and be invited to dinner more often.
Prayer for the Day
Higher Power, You made the trees. They stand, but they also bend, especially when they’re young and growing.
Action for the Day
I’ll list three times in my life where knowing how to bend would’ve been helpful.
© 1989 by Hazelden Foundation
FLEXIBILITY
“Better bend than break.”
~ Scottish Proverb
Disease: controlling, stiff and unbending. Sobriety: relaxed, comfortable, and flexible in my personal life and my interactions with others. Life: not a race or an exercise but an experience and an adventure. Before I accepted my alcoholism, I went through periods of “dryness.” I stopped drinking to please others, rather than accepting the true nature of my disease. Everything was a premeditated act behind my mask of cheerfulness. I was angry resentful, and in pain. Dryness is controlled denial.
Today the sobriety I have gained from my acceptance of self has overflowed into an acceptance of life on life’s terms. Today I am happy.
Let the wind of experience bend me toward the knowledge of Your love.
© 2008 Leo Booth
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Bend With The Wind
“We learn to become flexible.. As new things are revealed, we feel renewed.”
Basic Text p.98
“Flexibility” was not a part of the vocabulary we used in our using days. We’d become obsessed with the raw pleasure of our drugs and hardened to all the softer, subtler, more infinitely varied pleasures of the world around us. Our disease had turned life itself into a constant threat of jails, institutions, and death, a threat against which we hardened ourselves all the more. In the end we became brittle. With the merest breath of life’s wind we crumbled at last, broken, defeated, with no choice but to surrender.
But the beautiful irony of recovery is that, in our surrender, we found the flexibility we had lost in our addiction, the very lack of which had defeated us. We regained the ability to bend in life’s breeze without breaking. When the wind blew, we felt its loving caress against our skin, where once we would have hardened ourselves as if against the onrush of a storm.
The winds of life blow new airs our way each moment, and with them new fragrances, new pleasures, varied, subtly different. As we bend with life’s wind, we feel and hear and touch and smell and taste all it has to offer us. And as new winds blow, we feel renewed.
Just for today: Higher Power, help me bend with life’s wind and glory in its passing. Free me from rigidity.
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11
September
Bend With The Wind“We learn to become flexible.. As new things are revealed, we feel renewed.”
Basic Text p.98“Flexibility” was not a part of the vocabulary we used in our using days. We’d become obsessed with the raw pleasure of our drugs and hardened to all the softer, subtler, more infinitely varied pleasures of the world around us. Our disease had turned life itself into a constant threat of jails, institutions, and death, a threat against which we hardened ourselves all the more. In the end we became brittle. With the merest breath of life’s wind we crumbled at last, broken, defeated, with no choice but to surrender.But the beautiful irony of recovery is that, in our surrender, we found the flexibility we had lost in our addiction, the very lack of which had defeated us. We regained the ability to bend in life’s breeze without breaking. When the wind blew, we felt its loving caress against our skin, where once we would have hardened ourselves as if against the onrush of a storm.The winds of life blow new airs our way each moment, and with them new fragrances, new pleasures, varied, subtly different. As we bend with life’s wind, we feel and hear and touch and smell and taste all it has to offer us. And as new winds blow, we feel renewed.Just for today: Higher Power, help me bend with life’s wind and glory in its passing. Free me from rigidity.
Why not sign up to get emails with all daily posts included?
Or Follow Us On Twitter #essentialsofrec
