When I sat down this morning, I began to thing of the subject word. I also thought about “intergration” and “intragration”. “Inter” means between, and “intra” means within. What I thought about was integrity. A wholeness about myself. A unity of my insides and my outsides.
The other day, I was thinking about how fractured I was when I came in. I was broken. I came here in pieces, and little by little, the program, my sponsors, and the people around me, like Humpty Dumpty, began to put what was left back together. Something the king’s men couldn’t do. And the thing that maintains it is what all of the others gave me, a God of my understanding.
The first step in this process was the price of admission. It was that admission of who and what I was. It was the beginning of honesty, something I had lost along the way. The end of denial, which had probably been there all along. But, not only admission, but acceptance. The admission was an outer action; my speaking the words to others. The acceptance was an inner action. Both were the beginning of the process of drawing the insides and outsides together.
I was to start to draw my whole being into this process. There could be no reservations. This was the business of totallity. Each and every step along the way was to unite with myself totally.
What I was thinking was not about perfection. That’s for the angels. It was about coming to be a human being, who has integrity. By that I mean, a person, who lives by principles; both human and spiritual. Those principles as they are expressed in the steps and traditions of this program. It is a process that I believe is never accomplished, but always one for which we strive on a daily basis.
Part of my thoughts was about the difficulty, which comes to us all, when we have to try to practice these principles in all our affairs. What a job! It’s not for one, who thinks “how great I am”, for it often entails some humiliation. Some failures, which draws us back into practice of the preceding steps. The absolute proof of how far we have to go to establish ourselves and get a foothold on the path to integrity.
Where I find proof, for myself, that I mean to live a life of integrity, is when I find that after a fall, I can, with the help of others and the God of my understanding, pick myself up and start over again. I can also see this, when I am willing to help others to do the same. In other words, the basis of integrity, is humility. The humility to face the truth of myself and not suffer discouragement at what I find. To resolve to change and become what we all strive for; sobriety.
Anyway, just some thoughts.