“Can we steadfastly content ourselves with the humbler, yet sometimes more durable, satisfactions …?” (Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions)
I was told very early in AA to grow where I was planted, to be skeptical of dreams, ‘massive realisations’, handbrake turns, pulling big levers, lurches, flouncings-out, throwings of toys out of cots, plots, schemes, plans, designs, graduations, fresh starts, and every other attempt to avoid the work of the day and the problem presenting itself.
Almost every good change my life has undergone has been the result of circumstance forcing that change. Almost every bad change my life has undergone (since being sober) has arisen out of an idea I had all by myself, not forced by circumstance, not growing organically out of my present situation, molecule by molecule. Of course, huge change has taken place, but not from my insight or Stalinist five-year plans: those were always disastrous.
The real reason for the big changes that I envisioned by myself, for myself, has typically been an unwillingness to walk through a conflict, a boredom, the growing realisation of the implacable complexity of reality: its mixed bag of good and bad that I can frankly do little about. When reality started to bleed through my illusions, I would switcheroo, build a new castle in the sky, and move in.
When I grow where I’m planted, I find I can adapt to any situation, and that adaptation was the next lesson in the curriculum all along.