I just got off the phone with one angry man. It’s about his work. He’s madder than a wet hen in a barnyard after a rain storm.
I thought about what he’s going through and something struck me. He’s angry. I remember a friend of mine, who was trying to avoid a fight with his wife at the dinner table. This made her more angry and so she left the table in a fury, throwing back angry words as she did. He turned to the children and clapped his hands hard. The he said to the children. “You just heard the sound of a mind closing.”
What a truth. So simple. When we’re angry we slam the door shut in our minds. An open mind is not possible. We slam the door shut and are cut off from the sunlight of the spirit and we’re left alone in the darkness of our own mind.
How often I have been guilty of that. Too many times. Left in the black hole of my own being and making. I’ve closed the door on all help and have to sit in a dark basement, full of self pity and resentment. No one can get through that door. It’s sealed shut and I think and think and think. It begins to smell. It’s called stinkin’ thinkin’.
In the darkness of our minds, we can’t see how close we are to a drink. How many I’ve seen others, who could not open that door, but opened a bottle instead. That kind of example always got me to open that door. I wanted out.
The key to opening the door, as Bill pointed out, is willingness. But it also takes some humility the healer of all that painful thinking. Usually I felt humiliated having to admit that my thinking was wrong. But, not wanting to drink again got me to turn the handle on the door and open it.
All this could have been avoided, of course, if I had only practiced having an open mind. Open to the possiblities I had not considered. I needed help with the process. I needed to first calm the disturbance. I needed to talk to someone and express my anger to them. When I did they usually pointed a way out. They told me to get to a meeting. Not an easy thing to do when in the middle of pouting. But, somehow I would drag myself there and others could begin to pry my tightly clenched mind open and suddenly or gradually daylight would come through the cracks.
Without an open mind, I’m flying blind. Bill puts it that we’re off the beam. He was refering to flying blind in a fog by means of a radio beam. To avoid a crash we have to get back on
that beam or perish.
Anyway, I was thinking about this while I’m getting ready to go to a meeting.
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