Wisdom Of The Rooms - 2017

[bluidkiti]

August 28

Quote of the Week

“A mistake is only a mistake when I don’t learn from it.”

It was hard making the same mistakes over and over. Each new relationship ended just like the last one, and after a while I just resigned myself to being single the rest of my life. Same thing with jobs. Each new, exciting opportunity ended like the last disappointment, and soon I was unemployed again, searching through the Sunday classified ads. As each area of my life crashed and burned, I finally had to admit the unmanageability of it all, and I surrendered.

When I finally reached Step Four of the program and learned about the first three columns of the Fourth Step inventory, I finally thought I would be vindicated. Now I could list what others had done to me and assign the proper blame for the failure of my life. And that is when my sponsor sprung the mysterious fourth column on me – my part. What at first seemed a gross insult – “What do you mean my part? Look at what they’ve done to me!” – soon turned out to be the key to my freedom and recovery.

What I learned is that it was my character defects that were truly the cause of my repeated suffering. Just so long as I was unwilling to change how I behaved, just for that long was my life to remain unmanageable. I learned that when I finally admitted and corrected my part, that was when I could begin learning from the mistakes I was making, and move past them. Today, when something doesn’t go my way, I am quick to look at my part and to see where I have been at fault.

Doing so allows me to not only learn from it, but avoid repeating it in the future.