Rewards of Sobriety – Most everyone has heard the adage “You reap what you sow”. Nothing could be more true when you are talking about the life of a practicing alcoholic or drug addict. This has been my experience and the thousands I have met and counseled in my years of sobriety. The biggest problem is that in the midst of the disease we don’t view it that way because it is always someone, something or someplace that has caused the “reaping” it is never what we “sowed”.
But the reality is, and we begin to first learn this in the early stages of recovery, that it is always my actions that causes the reactions that I get. The great news for each and everyone one of us is that what was true in the madness of the addiction is also true in the process of our recovery. In other words, reaping and sowing are part of my life regardless of my current position.
One of the very first things that AA and my sponsor taught me was that I created my own misery. Just about the time that got me thoroughly depressed they also told me that if what I had done created the mess I was in then living sober from this point forward would create something completely different. They told me that if garbage in garbage out was true then so is sober living in then sober results was equally true.
My good buddy, Slow Will, told me “to clear away the wreckage of the present, so it didn’t become the wreckage of the past”. So live right and clean up after yourself became my goal and it worked. Little by little I began to see life through “another set of glasses” and I liked what I saw.
I said all of that to tell you this; I had a weekend that people like you and me could have only dreamt about. Please remember that I am a recovered alcoholic/addict who walked out on his wife and 2 children in 1981. I got sober in 1986 and I have spent my recovered years learning the way of sober living.
Robert Pardon
Robert is the Recovery Guy. Getting clean and sober on April 25, 1986 has given me the insight and practical skill set to not only stay sober, but to also re-invent myself to the person I always wanted to become. Showing others how to do this is my life goal.
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