“a degree of stability” (Page 49, Big Book)
“I suggest one thing.”
“OK. What?”
“Pick something, and do it every day.”
“That’s not very hard!”
“Just wait and see.”
I go to my homegroup (unless I’m out of town or taking
someone to accident and emergency).
There are some other things I do under the same conditions.
That doesn’t sound much, does it? Surely anyone can do
something as simple as that?!
Sounds easy until you try it. What seems simple and ordinary
will start to become a crisis, a drama, an emergency, an intolerable
imposition, a mountain that towers ominously over all other events. It becomes
the source of all lessons, the wall onto which all emotions are projected, the
venue into which I invite all necessary experiences.
And then you learn the lesson, and it passes, you settle
back, and you forget there was a problem in the first place.
But the real trick is to stick with it. Duck out, and you
have to start again somewhere else. Start again: from square one. One goes all
the way back to the beginning. Perform patchily, and there is no benefit at
all, because I am not really there. I’m there not because I’ve committed but
because I’ve decided it’s in my interests then and there, because there is no
better offer on the table. My presence is about me and my decision, and the
me-ness of my presence crowds out all other possibilities.
The thing committed to might be a home group, a marriage, a
career, a spiritual practice.
The devil lies in the chopping and changing, the mixing-up
of things. The ‘right’ to chop and change, to mix things up, is really the
right to make constant decisions, and who do you think is making those
decisions? Well, me, and that’s why the devil hates commitment, loves choices,
loves decisions, loves the exercise of common sense and reason, and loves
anything that gives me the opportunity to assert myself in opposition to God.
It loves the line, “Today I have choices.” It loves the phase, “happy, joyous,
and free”, because it contains the word ‘free’. It hates the phrase, “the dictates
of a Higher Power”.
What does doing well look like? Consistency, come rain, come
shine.
Is change ever legitimate? Of course, but only sparingly,
only when I’m at peace, and often only with reluctance. Sought change is often
prompted by the search for the shiny, the preference for the new, the avoidance
of a disagreeable emotion, the evasion of a lesson.
Every change is disruptive and destructive. The price is high, so the prize must be higher. Change is best not made lightly or frivolously.