2000-03-22 - 09:01:01

Sometimes I wonder a bit what method I used if any to imperfectly overcome the big faults that were mine. The methods were many and not all my faults are eliminated, of course.

In the sorting out process, one thread became obvious to me, somewhere in the process was one kind, caring person who did not try to force their opinion or way of thinking on me. But, they were a rooting section for me, and as the expression goes, liked me in spite of my faults.

It is said that a drunk can't be helped until (A) he hits bottom and (B) wants to be encouraged to change, or makes the decision to change.

It occurs to me this realization is a more or less, what ?, a generic thing. It seems to me that there is some one in the background to help and encouage us to change for the better.

In some ways they accomplished this by holding up a figurative mirror in front of my face. It wasn't the aversion therapy that is talked about, which only worked for me once in my life. It feels as if they enabled me to see my self as I truly was and provided the back wall to bounce my thoughts so to ricochet to thinking it over, just a friend listening sympathetically.

In my own mind if backed up against a wall and required to say just how they did it, after a great amount of thinking all I could say, "It's some kind of magic." At each dire point in my life, someone was there unobtrusively saying or doing the exact thing that would jump start my own logical thinking to realize that, "That way lies catastrophe." They were there for me at the time, and in railroad terms switched me onto the main line again from the disastrous siding I had been on.

It leads me to think how much deep sense, appplicable in many ways are the words of John Donne, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main," and the well known ending, "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." I always have to dig out Bartlett's to find the exact words of that sermon, all I can remember is, "No man is an island, entire of itself," but how it should be remembered by me. Every time I "islanded" my course was altered and not to the good direction. Many times now the words float into my mind, "NO MAN IS AN ISLAND."

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