String Of Pearls 117: Progress
-Practice makes perfect is a deadly idea for me. Practice makes progress works.
-”Do your best’ is a threatening idea. I guess I feel that way because growing up, I did my best to do my best and it was never good enough. “Now My aim is to the best I can today given my situation and the resources available.
-My folks did their best and it was a shitty job.
-Doing my best is also boring because it implies that I will never be better. if I have already done my best my best will never be better than what I did today. I prefer the idea of getting better and better for the rest of my life.
-In the past, people were very critical of me. The result was I did not trust process. If I could not do it well immediately, I would just quit.
-Sometimes, especially when I am doing something new, I feel like the way I am doing it wrong is better than the way some people are not doing it right.
-Anything worth doing is worth doing my way. That certainly includes recovery. In fact, I am going to do it my way until The fellowship demonstrates there is a better way to do it that will help me achieve my own goals for my own sake. I think the term to used here is enlightened self interest.
-Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.
-Young man’s disease is the idea that your basic choice in life is between slow progress and fast progress. The fact is my choice is between slow process and no progress. If I reject slow progress and fall to the false allure of fast progress, I end up with no progress or even regression.
-The good thing about slow progress is that it is a progress I am likely to keep. Fast progress comes to me quickly and tends to leave me quickly.
-Life gets more difficult for me as I age. I lose physically, my mind slows down, and friends and family die. If I just stay at my current level of maturity, the difficulties of life will ultimately outstrip my strength as I get older. That is true no matter how strong I am emotionally today.
-At 71, what I see is that the gains in wisdom and serenity I experience through growth amply compensate for the losses I experience because I am aging. For example, a year ago I told my daughter that I loved her two beautiful daughters more than I loved her at the same age. Jill and her sisters have never breathed a breath when I did not love them with all my heart, but when they were children, my heart was shrunken by fear, shame, inferiority and anger. today,my emotional evolution through program has given me a vastly larger ability to love.