Finding Gratitude

Imagine you wake up in the morning and find that armed terrorists are smashing in your front door with rifle butts.

The next thing you know, you and your family are pushed to the floor, and your hands are secured behind your back with plastic ties.  You are frozen in terror as your family is brutalized and screamed at before being executed before your eyes one by one.  Maybe you are the only one to survive, because you are being taken hostage into unknown territory to be held for ransom by savage animals.

While this may be something extreme for you to imagine, it was the unspeakable horror for many families in southern Israel this past weekend.

I bring up this example because many of us sometimes have trouble finding something to be grateful for – especially in early recovery.  But if we only look at the lives we lead in this state and in our country we can find many things to be grateful for.  In spite of political turmoil in our own country, we have a great deal of security in our lives, compared to the events the Israelis experienced this last Saturday. That alone is something to be grateful for.

This blog is not long enough for me to list the many things that I'm grateful for.  But I can be grateful for such mundane things as having enough to eat, employment, an automobile, and a roof over my head.  Yet at times I hear recovering alcoholics and addicts whine about the most basic things.

And I understand this. Because 32 years ago I was in new recovery myself. And I had this attitude of feeling sorry for myself at times. I would whine about poor me. What did I do to deserve this? Doesn't the world know who I am?

But today, with the perspective of having many years of recovery behind me, I'm grateful when I wake up in the morning and can open my eyes.  I'm grateful for my job.  I'm grateful for my friends.  I'm grateful for the people I love and the people who love me.  I'm grateful that I have my family back in my life – something that wasn't true when I first got sober.

My counsel to anyone reading this is to take an inventory of what you're grateful for.  You'll find many things – some of them minor and seemingly inconsequential – that maybe you haven't noticed before.

But these little things are the grist of our lives, the things that make up our very existence.  The things that make a life in sobriety so beautiful.  

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