What A Concept – IV
September 9, 2008 by Mark
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
Moving along in our book “Living Sober”
“It is very hard just to sit still trying not to do a certain thing, or not even to think about it. It’s much easier to get active and do something else – other than the act we’re trying to avoid.
So it is with drinking. Simply trying to avoid a drink (or not think of one), all by itself, doesn’t seem to be enough. The more we think about the drink we’re trying to keep away from, the more it occupies our mind, of course. And that’s no good. It’s better to get busy with something, almost anything, that will use our mind and channel our energy toward health.
Thousands of us wondered what we would do, once we stopped, with all that time on our hands… all those hours we had once spent planning, getting our drinks, drinking… turned into big, empty holes of time that had to be filled somehow.
We needed new habits of activity to fill those open spaces…
Recovered alcoholics often say, “Just stopping drinking is not enough.” Just not drinking is a negative, sterile thing. That is clearly demonstrated by our experience. To stay stopped, we’ve found we need to put in place of the drinking a positive program of action. We’ve had to learn how to live sober.”
Isn’t that interesting? Learning how to live sober! Rather than perceiving life as one continuously unsolvable problem…
