Setting Priorities and Living in Today
I have been having a hard time keeping up with all the emails lately and haven’t been as active with GROW as I want to be. I realized yesterday that I’m actually working 3 jobs – I have a full-time day job at a bank, I work as a ghostwriter at night, and almost all the time that I’m not working, I’m babysitting my 3 grandchildren because they have a deadbeat dad, and my daughter works opposite hours from mine.
When I first got sober, some people would insist that I had to do 90 meetings in 90 days. Back then, there were no online meetings, so a newcomer had to go to f2f meetings if she wanted to learn how to live life sober. As a single parent at the time (which I am again – a single parent and single grandparent), I was definitely unable to do 90 meetings in 90 days. Yet the program was the #1 focus and priority of my life. When I couldn’t get to meetings, I read the Big Book and the 12 and 12 daily, along with several daily meditation readings, and books such as “Living Sober” and “As Bill Sees It”. I would pick up the phone and communicate with other recovering alcoholics. I would write in a notebook my fourth and tenth steps.
Lately because of all that has happened – the death of my husband in 2012, the end of my daughter’s marriage a few months after that – I think I have been having a hard time putting my priorities in the right place. I have started to isolate and become unfocused.
Believe me, even though I have gone 26 years without picking up, I haven’t forgotten where I came from, and I know that I’m only an arm’s length from a drink and complete self-destruction. And one lesson I learned years ago is that a SLIP means sobriety loses its priority.
Another hugely important lesson for me in recovery has been that life is manageable when I keep it in 24 hours. I only have to live one day at a time. I don’t have to worry about the things I have to do next week or next month. I only have to set priorities for today, this one 24 hour period.
I’d like to propose as a topic “Setting Priorities and Living in Today.” How do you make your recovery the #1 priority in your life? How do you keep your focus on just today?