[bluidkiti]

March 24

Quote of the Week

"Once you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

I’ve always heard that alcoholism is a disease of perception. For example, when I first got sober I kept hearing that it was a disease, but I never really saw it that way. Once I started to work my program and learned more about it, I began to look at it differently, and sure enough it changed! Now I see alcoholism as the disease it truly is.

As I continued to work the Steps and recovery, I began changing the way I looked at a lot of things, and they also began to change. For example, my past used to be a source of shame and remorse. But when I looked at it as a source of experience, strength, and hope that I could use to help another, my feelings about it changed as well. Through this new perspective, I gained a new appreciation for it, and my very past seemed to change along with it.

Today, I know that every situation in life is open to interpretation, depending on how I choose to look at it. To help me gain perspective, I sometimes pretend I’m part of a debating club and have been assigned the task of building a case for the opposite point of view. Forcing myself to look at something differently changes my opinion and, seemingly, the thing itself. It always comes back to how I look at things. Once I change that, everything else changes as well.