Narcotics Anonymous

Just For Today - Daily Email Service

   September 11                                            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.