There are many lessons to learn while working on getting clean and sober. If fact, even after many years I need to continue working on them. It’s all about progress and not perfection, so the old saying “Live and Let Live” seems so to be so commonplace, but yet so right on the money when it comes to finding serenity. It’s simple to overlook the saying and to underestimate its value. But since it’s been repeated so often, it would appear to have proven beneficial power in the mind of a recovering addict.
In my opinion, “Live and Let Live’ simply is a practice of letting people have their position on topics. Sure I might disagree with what they say or do, and I won’t like it but I need to remember that other people’s opinions matter, at least to them. Learning to live with these types of differences is a direct reflection on our own level of comfort. Some go so far as to say we are tolerating other people’s behaviors, regardless how offensive of distasteful we my fine it. What’s important is that we don’t use drugs or alcohol over other people’s views.
Our sobriety, our recovery, our piece of mind comes first. So we should work hard to make an effort to try to accept people for who they are, especially when they rub us the wrong way. You don’t really know what they’ve gone through, and their opinions might be temporary, so jumping on them to ‘correct’ them places stress and bad feelings on you.
I think the clearest way to say this is that in recovery it is more important to understand someone else instead of being understood. Think about this. If everyone is spending time to understand others instead of being understood, we will then have a room filled with mostly listeners.
It’s also important to spend time with sober folks who are a bit closer to your views, so when someone comes along who doesn’t have the same opinion we tend to be less annoyed with them. The more time that goes by, the more time we are clean and sober, the more times we are not afraid to walk away from folks who annoy us.
Be focused on your own recovery. What works best for you is what works best for you. We are all doing the best we can by learning to “Live and Let Live.”
Recovery Rob BIO
Recovery Rob is a 48-year-old man who has more than twenty years of sobriety, whose drugs of choice at one time were alcohol and drugs, and he has worked in and around the field of addiction for more than 30 years. Having just recently launched his own website, www.askrecoveryrob.com, he hopes to reach out and continue to help others who work through their process of addiction and recovery. Recovery Rob is a professional writer who has published two novels and is currently working on his third. He has been writing and working as Pat Moore Foundation’s premiere blogger and content writer, which helps keeps Pat Moore Foundation’s addiction and recovery blog top-rated.