Tools for Living

Facing Our  Limits 

Did you know that we human beings are naturally oriented to a 25-hour day?  That's the cycle experimental subjects gradually set for themselves when they were left to  sleep, eat, and wake at will in an environment without access to clocks or calendars or the passing of the sun and moon.   Interesting finding!  Clearly God put us on this planet Earth with a challenge already prepared to keep us on our toes.   We have to squeeze our twenty-five hour desires into a twenty-four hour world.

Limits!  They are everywhere.  There is only so much money, so much storage room in our homes, so much time.  If we choose to keep one object in the closet, we cannot keep another object in that same space; if we go on vacation, we cannot pay down that credit card; if we do one activity on Wednesday afternoon, we cannot do the other.

In our stubbornness to have our way, we try to have it all anyway.  Speeding down the road with our cellular phones to our ears, we hurry to the mall or to the gym or to our children's next practice or lesson.  We have learned the art of  multi-tasking, but at what cost?  More, more, more! brings us no peace, no satisfaction.  We are a nation of people "thirsty in the rain," as Dr. Mary Pipher puts it:  we are drowning in an achievement-oriented, materialistic world that has left a spiritual void within not known by our forebears.

That is what Paul and I have seen in our own lives and in our practice of psychotherapy.   Through our professions, we have had the grace to listen to the stories of hundreds of people, to read and hear the best minds in the field of mental health, and to observe first hand what works and what doesn't work for people who hurt.  We gratefully count ourselves among the recovering community, those who practice the principles of what M. Scott Peck has called "the greatest contribution to religion of the Twentieth Century":  the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. 

Bob S. is said to have described the Twelve Steps in six words:  Trust God, Clean House, Help Others.  Those six words encapsulate the wisdom of all the world's greatest spiritual systems.   The good news is:  you don't have to have a diagnosable addiction to benefit from the Twelve Steps.  We are all addicts, chasing whatever that something more is to us.  Here at Courage2Change, we will bring you the best music and books, exercises and affirmations--all the most practical and accessible resources for you in your recovery--and we invite you to help us.  Keep checking back--this is only the beginning!