Time Flies Whether You're Having Fun Or Struggling - This Too Shall Pass.

I haven't posted here in a week, an insane week of a trip to the larger city a few hours away, then home and engulfed by dealing with the business stuff which had piled up unbelievably in only a couple of days. Success is wonderful, but it certainly seems to require an enormous outlay of time.

Lots of folks here moaning about the weather - we're having a very wet spring. I'm so used to this sort of climate that it doesn't even register. I long ago realised I either accepted the rain, or go quietly mad. We don't get the torrential downpours for days on end, that I endured when I was living in rainforest. A light rain is as nothing, compared to those soakers. It may rain here, but it stops. The sun shines about twice as often as it did in the last place we lived, and for that, I am deeply grateful.

My garden is leaping ahead with all the rain - that's fun, to see the huge amount of growth just in the few days I was out of town.

I'm feeling peaceful, accepting, grateful, and serene. I love this state of mind - serenity. When I was new to Al-Anon, I knew the meaning of the word, but I had no real understanding, because I'd never achieved it. Truthfully? I wasn't sure I believed it was possible. That makes me smile to recall. I was pessimisstic and negative; I've changed greatly over the years.

From the ODAT, page 135:

"Acceptance appears to be a state of mind in which the individual accepts, rather than rejects or resists; he is able to take things in, to go along with, to cooperate and be receptive."
                               (Dr. Harry M. Tiebout)

When I accept, take things in, go along, cooperate and am receptive, life flows smoothly, and I open myself to joy and serenity. When I let go of wanting someone else to be different, and allow them to live their own life, I then have the space and time (which was previously filled with resentment and obsessing) to achieve that which may have seemed impossible - serenity of mind and spirit.

Just as I cannot fix the other, so can no-one fix me; I have to be willing to do the hard work of program on my own. If I'm not ready, I won't do it. In the beginning, I needed to take it on faith when my sponsor and oldtimers in the program told me that "it worked if you work it." After I'd accumulated a few examples of this reality, I then could remind myself.