It’s to embrace challenges, week-by-week, day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour. It is recognize we are often required to go-counter to what feels easier or expected.

Easier or expected may be the least healthy of all options.

It’s to do what we can to love the nearest person at any moment, seek their highest good, highest interest. It is to serve their greater purpose, while being sure to do the same for ourselves.

It’s impossible to love another more than we are willing to love ourselves.

It is to engage our internal processes and modify and adjust when necessary. Why am I feeling feelings of un-forgiveness?  Why am I feeling anger? How much of what I feel is objectively valid? The deeper we are willing to go within our own realms, the less likely we are to impact others with our negative internal processes.

What’s inside will come out.

Deal with the negative while you can.

Free the positive to flow all it wants.

To be fully alive as to accept that our lives impact each other, that all relationships are cross-cultural experiences, that all people have something to teach us and show us. It’s to accept that none of us is superior (to others), none of us is inferior (to others).

Each of us is part of the human community with a valid and significant role to play.

Live well, today.

You (we) only get one shot at it.

Lake Geneva from the shore of the city of Rolle.

Addicts seek immediate gratification from (and with) their substance, drug, alcohol, nicotine, vaping or activity (gambling, pornography, illicit sex) of, often loaded, choice.

Their addiction is at the core of their motivation and drive. While addicts may not appear skillful at planning, their plans are almost exclusively to satisfy the addiction. 

It is important to know that at the height of need for their fix almost nothing else matters or counts. 

Tunnel vision reigns. 

Many addicts will have co-addictions. They often run in threes. The alcoholic will probably have two side addictions like smoking and gambling.      

The community surrounding the addict will benefit from knowing the addict does not want to be this way as forceful and determined as his or her behavior may appear to be.  

The addict needs support and acceptance and help (when he or she is ready) on the way out of the inner-hell that seems only quelled by this or these destructive behavior(s). 

Rejection, a “natural” response on your part, and judgement (from the community) is unlikely to deliver the addict to the land of wellness.

When the addict discovers the long road to recovery and sets his or her heart in the direction of sobriety and wellness  it will be because the addict himself or herself sees the light and desires recovery and not because you, who love the addict, are shining it in his face.