Bend with the wind
“We learn to become flexible.. As new things are revealed, we feel renewed.”
Basic Text p.98
“Flexibility” was not a part of the vocabulary we used in our using days. We’d
become obsessed with the raw pleasure of our drugs and hardened to all the softer,
subtler, more infinitely varied pleasures of the world around us. Our disease had
turned life itself into a constant threat of jails, institutions, and death, a threat
against which we hardened ourselves all the more. In the end we became brittle.
With the merest breath of life’s wind we crumbled at last, broken, defeated, with no
choice but to surrender.
But the beautiful irony of recovery is that, in our surrender, we found the flexibility
we had lost in our addiction, the very lack of which had defeated us. We regained the
ability to bend in life’s breeze without breaking. When the wind blew, we felt its
loving caress against our skin, where once we would have hardened ourselves as if
against the onrush of a storm.
The winds of life blow new airs our way each moment, and with them new
fragrances, new pleasures, varied, subtly different. As we bend with life’s wind, we
feel and hear and touch and smell and taste all it has to offer us. And as new winds
blow, we feel renewed.
Just for today: Higher Power, help me bend with life’s wind and glory in its passing.
Free me from rigidity.