In the old days when ever I thought about "putting down the squares" I did so with the nagging thought that to do so would require a miracle. I needed a magic wand to put out the fire of my desire for just one more. And lacking the proper fairy dust for the doing of such a thing, I proceeded down the road of addiction without much hope of ending the cycle...
But once I had a good talk with myself. Something I do with great frequency, although with varying degrees of honesty interwoven into the conversation. The thought occurred to me that I was trying to deal with this when I was not at my lowest point. Thinking of cessation often occurs when a friend or lover or relation of some kind succumbs to the effects of the addiction. In those difficult times, we begin to gather an awareness of the sad truth that what we are doing to ourselves has consequences. The truth of that is in front of our eyes. We see the person we care for begin to suffer and we are deeply moved. But we are not yet at our lowest point. We are seeing this thing happen but by some magic of the mind we do not necessarily make the connection between our addiction and that which has laid our friend low.
No. In order for us to finally do something about our own addiction, we must sink as low as we can. We must come to that place in life in which there are only two answers to the question of where we go from here. It is a multiple choice question with no room for nuance or equivocation. The fork in the road is clearly at our feet.
When all of our strength has been sapped. When we know good and true that cessation is the only road to travel. That is when we begin to make things better. That is the time for total commitment, it is the time when vulnerability makes us stronger. It is the time when fear files away in the face of courage. It is the time when we truly recognize the face in the mirror. It is in the time of our greatest weakness that we summon our greatest strength. And that is when miracles happen.
