"I shouldn't be feeling like this!"
"Then why are you?"
This brief exchange casts light on the fundamental truth that everything that is is the result of everything that has been, in an unfathomably complex mesh of interactions. This mesh of interactions involves the human exercise of free will at key nodes or decision-making points. At each of these points, the players survey the landscape, imperfectly, adduce principles, and decide how to act based on those principles. The decisions are circumscribed by what is possible: only possible actions can be taken. Broadly, the decisions made can be flawed logically (for a myriad of reasons) or flawed morally (for a myriad of reasons). The retroactive judgement of each act would have to be performed based on an understanding of the options appearing to be available to the decider at the time of decision. Even a sequence of decisions is only a composite of the individual decisions. The sequence cannot be judged except as the sum of its parts, e.g. by indicating that, for instance, a majority of the decisions were flawed, or even that a single flawed decision in an array of other, impeccable decisions had devastating consequences.
So far so good. But what happens when one surveys a particular landscape and determines this should not be so? Firstly, the determination presupposes a moral standard against which the landscape is being judged. That moral standard must be closely defined. The blanket assertion that people should be equal or that things should be fair requires a definition of what is meant by these two notions. Should two people earn precisely the same regardless of what work they do and whether they work? At what level is equality of outcome applied? Absolute? Subject to certain conditions? Presuming 'all things being equal'? Which features fall into the category of 'all'? Surely not really 'all'? Should the dead be paid the same as the quick? What is an 'equal condition', anyway? Are any conditions really 'equal'?
[If you're wondering at this point what this has to do with recovery and spirituality, hold on, it's coming.]
Accordingly, determinations of the right and wrong of gross situations are necessarily hampered by the complexity of firstly defining a moral standard (e.g. 'equality' or 'fairness') and secondly applying that moral standard to the circumstances.
The next step that is sometimes taken is to stipulate a different outcome, a different array of facts and circumstances that, if they were to prevail, would result in, say, a more equal or fair set of outcomes. There are two aspects of this that are questionable and speculative: firstly the practical achievability of that outcome and secondly the desirability of the outcome thus achieved.
A historical glance at revolutionary approaches, the imposition of a new, better system on an ailing one, illustrates these points: reality resists the installation of utopia, and, even when its external scaffolding is successfully imposed, the results are often as monstrous as those of Procrustes. The cake recipe, even if followed, produces a caricature of the picture in the recipe book.
Why is this? Arguably because the conditions, the strings of causal factors that brought about the baseline position, are still intact. Those causal factors continue to act, firstly to produce the outcomes that naturally flow from them and secondly to oppose the imposition of a system conceived by starting from a desired outcome and working backwards, like weeds growing in cracks or tree roots buckling a pavement. In other words, reality bleeds through; damming the river does not stop the rain in the mountains, and the water has to go somewhere. Planned economies fail. Revolutions end in horror. New ages die down and flicker out.
Now to what this has to do with recovery and spirituality.
How often have I looked at the outcomes in my life, rejected them, imagined an alternative set of outcomes, and tried to impose that from the outside?
Unhappy at work, I would change the firm I worked for, in the belief that the unhappiness was arising from the external factors arbitrarily grafted onto my life rather than being the natural outcome of an array of internal causal factors, way upstream of the material world. Worse: to the extent that the external choices, say of an occupation or employer, were indeed problematic, they were not divinely thrust upon (sorry Edmund) but themselves the ineluctable excrescence of my internal state. Without an alteration of that internal state, whatever external situation I placed myself in would simply be a further manifestation of my internal condition, only superficially different or better.
In other words, an attempt to force change from the outside fails.
Change can be wrought only by changing the first principles: start with the nothingness of self and reliance on God; start with the simplicity of doing the next right thing; start with the simplicity of growing where I'm planted. Only such actions work on first causes within me, and, once first causes are altered, all that flows from them alters, too, like good blood flooding through the red tree of the vascular system to drive out poisoned, coagulated residues.