Has it produced one iota of improvement to scold, weep, complain, accuse, reason, appeal or threaten? (ODAT, February 1)
That's a good Step Four list:
Scold, weep, complain, accuse, reason, appeal, or threaten.
Those would be a good seven things to avoid today.
Notice that reason is up there. Reason sounds so, well, reasonable. When it comes to fixing a computer or billing a client or doing a thing of the world, fine, use reason.
But for 'managing my life'? No. It might be a waystation, but the smart money is on inspiration, an intuitive thought, a decision that floats to the surface of the mind.
I cannot, in any case, 'manage' my life. God's in charge. I just get to follow the instructions, dosed down the tube one by one, as I blindly turn the dial on the safe in the bank vault, click by click, not knowing what gold or dust or skeletons lie inside.
Vault upon vault, vault within vault, until the innermost place, where there is just God, and God will just be pleased to have been found, and everyone else who has taken the journey will be there, too.
The answer does not lie out there, in the world, or in the tail, me, wagging the world by wagging my finger until everyone stops doing what they're doing to listen, pay attention, and obey like automata with metal plates implanted on their skulls.
The world is not there to do my bidding.
But that rubs both ways: I'm not there to do the world's bidding.
I'm there to do God's bidding. Usually that involves going with the flow, which can look like the world's bidding, but is really a canny ruse to get through the mill unscathed: resist too resolutely and the wheels will grind you to dust.
But the real message is this: submit to God's moulding: be the moulded not the moulder; and then discover the result, like those sudden origami birds that emerge from an unfathomable sequence of meaningless folds of dead paper. And then, remarkably, sing.