Don't waste your time hating a failure. --Clarissa Pickola Estes
We are members of the human community. We make mistakes as we trek through this forest. We must remember that our mistakes offer us opportunities for new understanding. If we lived without error, our lives would be static, unchanging. Our emotions remind us that we are very much alive.
Self-hatred has been common among us. Anger, resentment, remorse, and terror are likewise familiar. Emotions will always play key roles in our lives. They can inspire us to action; they can also impede us. One of the most important lessons of recovery is knowing when to act and when to be still, when to forgive ourselves and when to feel shame, when to let go and when to take charge.
Deciding to move ahead instead of being shamed by a failure is evidence that we are recovering.
I will accept my failures today as part of my humanity and part of my education. I am here to learn.
We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive from where we started And know the place for the first time. --T. S. Eliot
We spend much of our lives looking forward to milestones we hope will mark our passage into wisdom--that time and place when once and for all we will know all there is to know.
When I am thirteen, I'll be grown up, we say. When I am sixteen, eighteen, 21, drive a car, graduate, marry, write a book, own a house, find a job, or retire; then I'll be grown up.
When we seek complete transformation, mere insight is disappointing. We find we don't know all there is to know--not at thirteen or 35 or 80. We are still growing up.
The baby, the child, the younger person each of us was yesterday is still with us; we continue to love, hate, hurt, grieve, startle, delight, feel.
There is no magic moment of lasting enlightenment, simply a series of fleeting moments lived one at a time each day. They bring us home to who we've always been.
