Surrender Anger, for Serenity.

I cannot achieve serenity, if I am engaged in the taking of someone else's inventory, and chewing over the myriad ways in which I've decided they are coming up short. The moment I begin to turn my gaze, from my own character defects to those of another, I have lost my focus, and I am about to lose my serenity.

I want peace.

How do I find my way to that glorious place? By following the road map drawn for me, by those who have worked out some of the best ways to get there. By relinquishing my desire to control, and accepting my powerlessness. By attending  meetings, reasoning things out with someone else in program, and seeking my Higher Power as I understand him/her/it.

By choosing the long-term goal of serenity and peace over the short-term satisfaction of anger and judgement.

Someone asked me, "Why do I keep choosing anger, then - I hate that feeling!"

We do what we learn. I have had to unlearn the lessons of how to deal with anger, which I'd internalised as a child, and relearn a different way.

We do what works for us - in everything, there is a payoff. It may be a payoff of being able to take what a friend in program calls "the moral high ground." Perhaps our anger at this person allows us to feel that we are right and they are wrong. We may feel self-righteous. We may feel superior. We may feel an awful pain, and wish for comfort, but have no way as of yet, to ask for that, so instead, we express it as anger.

I can feel angry when my boundaries are violated, my feelings are dismissed or negated, when unkindness is repetitive, when I am being treated with disrespect.

My anger may be a perfectly reasonable response, but I cannot change other people. I have to detach from what they are doing, and step far enough back, to be out of range of whatever slop is flying. When I am detached, I see what's happening, but it doesn't get to me the same way. I'm out of range, when I'm detached. I seek peace where I've found it before - in my Higher Power, in the love of my program friends, in the deepest core of my own self.