Today's Thought - May

[bluidkiti]

May 29

I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve.

~Michel de Montaigne

One of our tools of recovery is reading. Most of our groups have daily meditation books from which we read aloud, and many of us read a meditation each day at home. We find that the writing, short and compressed, helps us to collect our thoughts, and then our minds and feelings expand outward beyond our reading.

Reading is not only entertainment; it is a kind of silent conversation with ourselves. And as we browse through our favorite books, we carry on a dialogue with old friends. We are taken out of ourselves and moved more deeply into the process of living.

As addicts, we need this dialogue. Most of us are often locked away in our worlds of fantasy and fear. We need the kind of intimacy that can come from reading, and we need the interaction and stimulus that inspiring books give us. We can move out and talk about them with our friends and enlarge our circle of knowledge and experience.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to read, which takes me out of myself.

Today's reading is from the book Answers in the Heart: Daily Meditations for Men and Women Recovering from Sex Addiction*