What Does Your House Look Like?
7:54 AM Edit This 12 Comments »
There's a book that I read every morning during Kate and The Universe Time. I was taught to do this in treatment - as a way to center my thoughts before I started the day. My favorite reading is from the day of my birthday. I turned 33 in treatment. And I got chocolate cake. Cake notwithstanding, when I have lost track of my head and my thoughts start to scatter and nothing makes sense, I go back to my birthday reading. I'm going to paraphrase it here for you.
Practicing recovery is like building a house. First I had to pour a big, thick concrete slab on which to erect the house; that was the equivalent of stopping drinking. But it's pretty uncomfortable living on a concrete slab, unprotected and exposed to the heat, cold, wind and rain. So I built a room on the slab by starting to practice the program. The first room was rickety because I wasn't used to the work. But as time passed, as I practiced the program, I learned to build better rooms. The more I practiced, and the more I built, the more comfortable, and happy was the home I now have to live in.
Most mornings, when I close my eyes, I picture what my house looks like. Sometimes it looks like this.
But that presupposes that it's been built, so sometimes I just get the slab. And sometimes, it's a beautiful house with bright sunshine streaming in the windows and fresh flowers on the table. Today, I'm feeling a little rickety. I wonder what I'll get tomorrow.
12 comments:
Know what I love about the way you feel today? That you know tomorrow could be better. Hang in there!
I totally get you. Today my metaphorical house is all sunny and clean. Tomorrow it could be a mess of plaster dust and preschooler dress up clothes and a sink full of dishes.
Oh.
Wait...
That's my real house.
Please keep in mind that your bright shiny house should come with a housekeeper. That way on days when the house feels and looks a little rickety, you can yell at your housekeeper to get her act together or you will have her deported!
My house is...
owned by someone else, so I never have to worry about actually doing stuff.
I like the extended analogy. Sometimes my house is in shambles, other times a deck of cards, and sometimes a mansion among mansions.
I murdered kittens, so right now my house looks a lot like Hell :-(
My house is looking pretty good. I spent time doing internal housekeeping on the weekend instead of my actual housekeeping, but I still feel cleaner.
Very, very interesting read.
Hopefully tomorrow there will be sunshine and flowers waiting for you.
My "house" today? The house is sturdy, but the windows are missing and the wind is whipping papers and stuff all over the place and I'm chasing after everything to set it all back down in its proper place.
Picturing it is half the battle.
Last night I had a dream that a popular radio psychologist had come over to my house. But I was living in my mom's old house..(so this was a dream about old old issues) and even though I had lots of pretty glass German Easter Eggs out decorating the mantels, I also still had a whole bunch of Christmas stuff that I needed to put away. The house was a mess filled with two Christmas trees in the middle of being taken down.
So my house is pretty messy today too. My holidays are bumping into one another and I need a psychologist to come over and help me transition and put all the old stuff away apparently.
You don't have to be in recovery to have a rickety house from time to time....
Mostly though Kate your house is filled with light and the smell of Murphy's oil soap on gleaming wood floors where everyone comes over to see the lovely puddles of light
My house, today, has lots of open windows.
Because my office doesn't.
And it's freaking gorgeous outside.
And I'm bitter.
I'm not sure I have a house. I think I have an old warehouse in the garment district of New York...
Post a Comment