Gratitude and Glen Campbell

I was up late last night reading a friend's stories about his recovery from alcoholism. It was mind-blowing and provided tremendous food for thought.  As a codependent and someone who grew up with alcoholics, I have to be vigilant about allowing people to hurt me, and getting stuck in the past so much that I forget to take care of things in the here and now, and feel gratitude for all the very good things I have in my life.  I am not the sum of what one person thought of me,especially a person desperately in need of his own help.  I tend to absorb people's opinions of me and look to them to validate who I am, when I am in an unhealthy phase.

Anyways, my friend wrote about a man he was sponsoring who had lost a million-dollar inheritance, and a condo where he lived downstairs from Glen Campbell, of all people.  The alcoholic, despite all my friend's efforts to help him as a sponsor, kept crying that he used to lived downstairs from Glen Campbell, that he wanted to be a famous artist, etc.  He refused job training and other help because he could not let go of his fantasies.  Fantasies are okay, but there's the here and now also, and putting one's nose to the grindstone is how things get done (it's called "doing the footwork").  The poor guy could never consciously will gratitude for whatever he had in the moment.  Gratitude can be summoned in many, many personal happenings we come across in daily life.

It was great writing, and helped me re-focus on doing what I need to do for today and putting the rest in the hands of my Higher Power.  It helps more than I can express here.