When I was a kid, one day I found myself staring at the stove in my kitchen. One of the four black rings on it were lit up incredibly red. I was so drawn to it. And I mean REALLY drawn to it. The glow was totally beckoning me in. So, for whatever the reason, I decided it would be a good idea to check it out further by putting my hand down on it. I just wanted to see what it felt like. Big mistake of course. I melted the skin on my hand pretty bad that day. But you want to know what’s so ironic about this really painful story from my childhood is how it’s a lot like the life of an addict.
You see addicts love the glow of whatever it is they become eventually become addicted to. It initially lures them in with its beautiful light. Some part of them knows though that it’s going to burn them if they get too close to it. Yet they do it anyway and eventually it burns them severely. A burn that somehow heals just enough at some point in time for them to totally forget about the damage it once caused them. And when that glow shows up in their life again, the memory of the last burn from it is gone leading them to fall straight back into a trance with it, getting burned by it once more, and often even worse that the last time.
I know this sounds like insanity, and it truly is. I knew all the addictions that once gripped me so fiercely were bad for me. They each glowed with intensities in their own way and at varying times, which I repeatedly found myself just having to check each out a little further. And each time I did, I eventually would get so burned by it that I’d recoil in pain that would last a long while. Pain that I always seemed to forget, because the glow of whatever it was would repeatedly beckon me in again at some inevitable point down the road, only to do the same thing again to me.
Truly my life of addictions is almost different as well than being a mosquito that’s drawn to one of those bug zappers typically found outside in the hot days of the summer. As soon as they touch the light they’re zapped dead, which is no different than the number of times I’ve gotten zapped by one eerie glow after another of one addiction after another, never realizing that none of them were good for me.
Thankfully, my recovery life has taught me there’s a better solution though and that was to find my own inner light to be drawn to. That process has taken me more than a decade to find it and now I’ve realized the only glow I’ll ever need to be drawn to lives within me. It’s always lived within me in fact. I just needed to slow down enough to get in touch with it, which is my soul of course. But you want to know what the best part of touching my soul is? It doesn’t burn me whenever I do. Now that’s some food for thought…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
