As much as I’d like to think recovery and God can be beaten into others, it cannot. I try to offer what I can and educate through experience, but I cannot actually change anyone. Nobody has ever recovered because of me, nor will they. If you recovered because I helped you, the truth is that you would have recovered anyway. The truth is that you were looking for it and someone just happened to be there to lay the solution at your feet. If not me, it would’ve been someone else. You were simply meant to recover.

     The best you can do is pray and take care of yourself. Just like we must give our own lives over to God, we must also give our loved ones and even our children over to God as well. Even if you try to hold on, it is pointless, for they belong to God anyway. Control will be ripped out of your hands like a thief in the night. If we come to truly understand and accept this, it really is absolute freedom.

     You can’t stop fate. 

     When push comes to shove, no matter how much you try to manipulate something, if someone is going to become an addict, they will become an addict, and they will use as long as they are meant to. If they are going to recover, they will recover. If they are going to die, they will die. Nothing you think, say or do is going to interfere with our ultimate fate.

     Forcing your will accomplishes nothing. Never has, never will. You think you can change things but you can’t, as control is just an illusion. The addict will only change if he or she is meant to change. Some do, some don’t. Sorry. All you can really do is observe the present. Reality is your ultimate fact. If your addict is still an addict, it is meant to be because that is what’s happening. You can’t argue with what is, with the way things are.

     I still believe that if someone gives their whole life (not 99%) to the Steps and to God, they will not fail, but what is also true is that some of us will just never do that, and that is the fate which I speak of. So you can try to beat it into us all you want but it is a waste of time. I just tell people now, “When you’re ready get better and change, give me a call. Otherwise, don’t call me.” Some of us are not chosen to recover. Yes, chosen.

      So even if you think that your intervention is what saved some addict, it really isn’t. If he or she recovers, they were going to recover anyway, intervention or not. And if an addict does not recover, they were never going to, so don’t beat yourself up because nothing you could have done would have prevented the outcome.

     I know I always say that cause and effect exists and that what we do creates and shapes the world we leave behind, and while that is certainly true to an extent (in the shorter term) and while we can certainly alter our own personal direction, in the larger sense, it is somewhat irrelevant, for we will probably wind up in the same place.

     The more things change, the more they stay the same. We think we can manipulate things, but we cannot. We think we can manipulate the entire world, but the world is going where is the world is going. Though we may like to give ourselves credit for influencing certain outcomes and changing, it is just a figment of our imagination. We cannot touch the power behind natural cycles, the power behind the forces of nature and its inevitable trajectory.

     There is a blueprint. There is an order to things. The chaos is actually quite organized.

     I know this concept is hard to grasp but we should come to grips with it to mitigate the internal agony of expectation, and also so we don’t get totally slaughtered out there in the real world. This is why people lose so much money trying to invest, or maybe that’s just because they are trusting some money manager at a bank or investment firm, which is a guaranteed loss. The only people who make money understand and respect cycles. And all this doesn’t mean it’s not wrong to sit on your ass, because it is. We should work hard regardless of the outcome, just for the sake of working hard, just because it is the right thing to do…

God, please remove any delusions of grandeur I may have in thinking I can control and manipulate that which lies outside of myself…