I can’t imagine having patience and tolerance in my recovery from addiction these days without love guiding me. This is something I’ve been pondering since attending an AA meeting where the topic was only on those first two qualities.
During all the years when addictions consumed the best of me, I had very little patience or tolerance for anything. With patience, my attitude was usually something along the lines of “I want what I want and I want it now!” And with tolerance, it was frequently close to “As long as you’re doing what I want you to be doing, we’ll be ok!” This made for a very controlling type of existence where everything had to be and go my way. Any love that happened to be present in my life during all those years was definitely conditional or agenda-based. In other words, my love always came with a price. None of this changed much at all until I began working on the 12 Steps.
By working on those 12 Steps, I had to take hard look at all of my selfishness and self-centeredness and it wasn’t easy. I saw how self-absorbed I was and how my lack of patience and tolerance was always directly related to my inability to love unconditionally. But the more I worked on those steps, the more I drew closer to my Higher Power. And the more I drew closer to my Higher Power, the more I started removing my selfish behaviors. And the more I started removing my selfish behaviors, the more I began loving unconditionally in life. And the more I began loving unconditionally in life, the more I found myself having patience and tolerance with everything and everyone in the world.
Unfortunately, there have been moments over the years in recovery when I’ve slipped back into selfish and self-centered behaviors. When they’ve happened, it was always due to me drifting away from my relationship with my Higher Power. And each time I did, not only did my levels of unconditional love decrease, so also did my levels of patience and tolerance. The only solution I’ve found to consistently prevent this from happening is to stay as close to my Higher Power as possible. It seems that when I do, I find ever-increasing levels of unconditional love flowing within me, which in turn continually raises my levels of patience and tolerance.
So I can’t imagine having patience and tolerance in my recovery today without love being their driving force. The unconditional love I have today is by far the greatest I’ve ever had in my entire life. I’m quite grateful to my Higher Power for this, because I find myself today being far more patient and tolerant with everyone and everything, especially for any of those times when things aren’t going my ego’s way…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
