Just For The Day
Just For The Day
#14 - August 27, 2025 - Choosing Life
Jay and Diane read the NA Daily Reader for August 27th then share their thoughts on how active addiction represents a death wish while recovery means consciously choosing life through changed patterns and behaviors.
Just for today, choose life by choosing recovery. Take care of yourself.
Question: How do you focus on recovery each day and avoid the temptations to numb or waste your life?
Jay and Diane's Just For The Day podcast is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Just for Today, any 12-Step program, or any other recovery-based product or organization. They should not replace your regular group or sponsor meetings.
The views expressed are solely those of the hosts and guests. Take what you like and leave the rest.
Welcome back to another episode of Just for the Day. I'm Jay and I'm a recovering addict.
Speaker 2:I'm Diane and I'm codependent.
Speaker 1:Hi Diane.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm still not feeling well, but I'm joining Jay today for this reading on August 27th.
Speaker 1:We missed you yesterday. It was a great reading.
Speaker 2:The 10th.
Speaker 1:Step Inventory Very good, but today is the 27th Choosing Life. And the quote is Change from self-destructive patterns of life became necessary.
Speaker 2:Active addiction is a smoldering death wish. Each of us courted death every time we used. Our lifestyles, too, put us at risk. The life of an addict is sold cheaply, with every day and every dose.
Speaker 1:In recovery. The first pattern we change is the pattern of using. Staying clean is the start of our journey into life, but our self-destructive behavior usually went far deeper than just our using. Even in recovery, we may still treat ourselves as if we are worthless. When we treat ourselves badly, we feel badly, and when we feel badly, we seek relief. Badly, we feel badly, and when we feel badly, we seek relief. Maybe even in our old solution, drugs.
Speaker 2:Choosing recovery means choosing life. We decide each day that we want to live and be free.
Speaker 1:Each time we avoid self-destructive behavior, we choose recovery. I will choose life by choosing recovery.
Speaker 2:I will take care of myself. I like the idea of us selling our lives cheaply and it makes me think about how time is our most valuable resource and how many days, weeks, years we spent wasting it away in complaints, in criticism, in using substances, in whatever it is that we wasted time with, and now that we've been sober for a long time, in our home, the big time wasters we notice now are things like television and social media and that kind of thing, but we spend time poorly and don't actually take the time to live life.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And all of those things are numbing. They're all things that are placating us, but they're kind of distracting us from the world around us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really like this idea of sold cheaply. I'm glad you're bringing it up, because an addict spends inordinate amounts of time looking and seeking drugs and that behavior would be much better used, well, could be put to better use. That time is more valuable than the outcome that they're getting out of it Right, and so it is sold cheaply. And then, as you gain additional recovery, you find out oh, there are actually a lot of behaviors where.
Speaker 1:I am selling my time for less value. I'm not getting the price that my time is worth, which I think is an interesting question to ask yourself. How much is your worth, your time worth, which I think is an interesting question to ask yourself how much is your worth your time? Worth? How much is your time worth and are you deploying it, honoring the value of that time? Right and, and there's probably an?
Speaker 1:you know, I used to judge your father for this because he would spend hours picking up metal in dumps to cart it home, to then sort it at night watching a, to then put it into the different piles of copper and tin and whatever, to take it for the dump to get $450 after a winter's worth of work. And I'm going and looking. You could probably make that at McDonald's in two weeks right For him.
Speaker 2:It was just keeping his hands busy and his mind busy, but that's my point.
Speaker 1:During his downtime, he didn't need the money, and yet this is the way, this is how he valued his time, and it had a monetary component. Now, there's all sorts of things going into that that you could say, yeah, he was keeping his mind busy and trying to stay active, and there's all sorts of things that go into that. And yet I couldn't help but judge that harshly right and say your time was worth far more. And you know, I do the exact same thing at the time. I wasn't paying attention to all the time I was playing video games, and I wasn't paying attention to all the time I was playing. I was, uh, you know, looking at Facebook right and scrolling through algorithms. How much worse was that?
Speaker 1:than your dad cleaning the world up, you know, metal microwave by microwave yeah, well, and the codependent?
Speaker 2:how much time do we spend obsessing about? Our addict, yeah as if we could control things or trying to control things, or setting rules about their behavior that we don't have control over, and then having to spend the time enforcing the rules or worrying if they're going to break the rules, and just all of this pattern that we that we do.
Speaker 1:That gets in the way of living well, and then I think about okay, there's, there's definitely a good, better, best paradigm here, where you know there are things that are good, things that are better and things that are best. And as I've spent more time reflecting on how I'm deploying my time, the things, actually the question that's made me realize this is what do I regret?
Speaker 1:and as my children have grown older and they've lost their childhood, I regret not pausing and paying attention at the time I had that I that I missed when they were asking for my attention right the other day yesterday, charlie was asking me if I could throw him around the house right he said can you wrestle with me, dad? He asked me three times like, okay, I'm gonna make, and I took him and I threw him around everywhere, thrashed him in that in that, and but you know what, like there were, there's easily 10 other things I could have put my time into right then I had other things on my mind, right, and yet I won't ever have that moment back with him at that age and how valuable is that?
Speaker 2:there's nothing more valuable than that in those, because those times are fleeting and so and those are memories he'll remember and me yeah, yeah, it's amazing how many opportunities like that we miss when we're preoccupied with addiction with ours or someone else's addiction. So I like that. It says each time we avoid self-destructive behavior, we choose recovery, whether that self-destructive behavior is the obsession, codependent or addict, whether it's the actual using or the penalizing or you know the martyrdom that we experience, all these terrible things that we soak in that keep us from realizing how great life can be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, barriers, and I think there's something to be said about. I like how it's characterizing these things at death, and our lifestyles, too, put us at risk. I think there's this. I'm remembering just this weird. For some reason this is making sense to me. But so bear with me. In Dune, in the new edition of Dune, the new film that came out right, the mother teaching the son about the. What was the name of the? It doesn't matter the teaching that they're doing. She was she, she. She was saying a prayer at one point and talked about how fear is a little death. And I love that statement because too often to people, too often are people afraid and they don't call it for what it is that it is a death. You are literally killing something inside yourself because you're not doing what you should do. You're shrinking.
Speaker 2:You're damning yourself or stopping yourself from something.
Speaker 1:And to call that anything but death does it a disservice. And if you call it a death and understand, you are literally stopping yourself, stopping progression, and that. So I like the way that this is talking about, because it makes me feel like the way it's putting is that Our daily behaviors could put us at risk. Our daily, our lifestyles, too, put us at risk. And then every time I choose, every time we avoid self-discovery, we choose recovery. We choose life right. Choosing recovery means choosing life, and those actions are choosing life, which I just like characterizing now because they're that serious.
Speaker 1:There is no, it reminds me of this other thing and I'll shut up and you can comment. I just like characterizing them that way because they're that serious. There is. No, it reminds me of this other thing and I'll shut up and you can comment. In the end of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, stephen Covey talks about coming across the book and reading in it a statement that said the more he engages with life I don't remember who the author is, I think it was Viktor Frankl actually in A Man's Search for Meaning the more I engage with life, the more I realize, no, the more I work with small things, the more I realize there aren't any small things that everything has value, every small behavior, and I really like this idea of characterizing the small decisions as incredibly important life or death, recovery, life addictive, self-destructive behavior, death anyway, it reminds me of a conversation I had many years ago with somebody who, um, he had talked about in his youth.
Speaker 2:He thought he was living. He thought he was living because he had freedom and he would go out drinking and partying with his friends and he was free to do that. And then he had the consequences he'd have hangovers or he'd have, you know, bad choices that they made in the evening that would come back to haunt him the next day or things like that. But he, he thought that that was like the epitome of living life. Right is being able to just party as hard as he wanted, whenever he wanted and whatever. And he used to look at people who were married and think that poor, boring life yeah like how awful that must be.
Speaker 2:And then he said and then he had kids and that changed it for him. That changed it where now what's important to him is anything that he can spend time with his kids if they're going to play at the park and he's going to chase them around the park, that is living yeah and he thinks back on those days of being a teenager and thinking that he was, you know, living life.
Speaker 2:And he's just like I wasn't. I was constantly afraid of people's perceptions of me. I was constantly pushing limits because I was rebelling against something like there was a motive that wasn't a pure motive, and he's like. My pure motive now is I just want to be with these people and I love being with these people and I enjoy them. And lately I've been watching a lot of um videos on Facebook that talk about parenthood Facebook that talk about parenthood, and one of the one of the main themes I guess that comes out is people who don't have kids feeling like kids will be a burden to them and they don't necessarily know that they want to have kids. And every time that comes up, the people who are in the panel or people who are talking in the video will always say that's because you don't have kids, and any parent here who's had kids will tell you that's where joy comes, that's where meaning comes. If you don't want to be a depressed 35 year old woman, then get married and have kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because family is one of the greatest lives, lives that you can choose yeah, you can't, and that's one of the beautiful things about truth is is that you can choose. Yeah, you can't, and that's one of the beautiful things about truth is that you cannot get away from the fact that anybody who experiences most people, I would say there is a small group of people that don't like parenthood and they hurt their children as a consequence right, because they resent them, and so I would say the vast majority of people who engage in parental behavior through typical families is a reality check to all the things that they thought were important that aren't actually important, because they realize, by comparison, those things were so small.
Speaker 2:They had no bearing on how important these little lives are and how much joy I get to experience you know Well, and especially those of us who are in recovery right, If you want to really tackle your demons, have kids. They will bring up every possible trigger that you could imagine.
Speaker 1:They will also make your marriage harder and that's hard, but that's really hard to hear for people who can't have kids.
Speaker 2:Of course of course. It's not possible for everybody, and that's heartbreaking.
Speaker 1:It's more than heartbreaking. We recently had this experience, where now we have children.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when we were younger, we would talk about getting pregnant and I'd be knocked up. It was like that, and we had friends who dealt with infertility and it was always hard. And it got to a point where some of them would really give me dirty looks and I'd feel awful because I couldn't help it that I was just fertile.
Speaker 1:We also didn't understand. And then we wanted to go back and have more kids later in life and we had made some decisions medically that prohibited that and had made it impossible pretty much.
Speaker 2:Well, we didn't know that at the time.
Speaker 1:So we did go through fertility treatments and it was it was exhausting and emotionally draining, because you're so hopeful and you try every time and you ramp yourself up to do it again and then it's failure after failure, after failure, and it's so just disappointing and disheartening.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know all of those. And we had the luxury of four kids to fall back on and say you know, the currently family that we have is not that bad. Let's just focus on what we have.
Speaker 1:So we feel our hearts go out to those families, to those individuals who are unable to, either because they don't, they're not capable, or because they haven't had the opportunity because they're not married or have a partner that's willing to. You know cause? You obviously can't do it alone. You can but you can you know it's a lot harder.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but there are beautiful aspects of life, whether they involve your family or not. You can um, you can find joy in your life, and I think that's the point of the program. Serenity is there, it's available to you, you just need to take the steps to find it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great reading Anything else from yours? Okay, so just for today. Choose life by choosing recovery. I will take care of myself.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining us everybody.
Speaker 1:See you next time.
