~SPIRITUAL~ A DAY AT A TIME

03-12 REFLECTION FOR THE DAY

If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we'll find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand.  So let us, with God's help, continually surrender these crippling liabilities.  Then we can be set free to live and love.  We may then be able to Twelfth-Step ourselves, as well as others, into emotional sobriety.  DO I TRY TO CARRY THE MESSAGE OF THE PROGRAM?

TODAY I PRAY
May I first get my emotional and spiritual house in order before I seek to carry out serious commitments in human relationships.  May I look long and thoroughly at "dependency" -- upon alcohol or other drugs or upon other human beings -- and recognize it as the source of my unrest.  May I transfer my dependence to God, as I understand Him.

TODAY I WILL REMEMBER
I am God-dependent.



 

ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN by Robert Fulghum. 

(a guide for Global Leadership)

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned:

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don't hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don't take things that aren't yours.
• Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.