“You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”
– Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry (1971)
I’ve learned one overarching lesson from my years of recovery, study, and working with men in addiction.
Lucky is not a plan.
Let me explain. Too often, in our quest for recovery, we just hope to get lucky. We hope things will just go our way – with our marriage, kids, job, health, and finances. “If everything goes right,” we reason, “we can make it in recovery.”
Don’t hate me for saying this, but I really believe it’s true. Your recovery is on you, so own it!
If it takes a loving wife, disciplined kids, an adoring boss, and the circumstances always going your way, in order to stay in recovery, I would humbly suggest you were not really in recovery in the first place.
Recovery Step: Recovery is not the act of staying sober because everything is going your way. Recovery is the act of staying sober when nothing is going your way. Recovery is not about what is going on around you, but in you. And that’s good news, because you don’t get a vote in deciding what’s going on around you anyway.
