One of the challenges of detoxing one’s system from chemical agents, which is what I am doing this week, (I have not had a drink of coffee or an alcoholic beverage in four days), is how to deal with the empty spaces that suddenly appear when one is no longer preparing for, or indulging oneself in, the consumption of these things. No more coffee refills several times a day and no more glasses of wine or cans of beer before going to bed. I just want to feel what life was like before these things became so important and seemingly necessary to me. So far, so good. No headaches, no physiological disturbance that I’ve noticed. These addictions were only emotional, rather than chemical. Of course, the emotional addiction that I struggle with the most- my incessant drive to have the attention and praise of others, is much more difficult to disengage from. How do I even measure progress in this? One can count the cups of coffee or the alcoholic beverages, but how do I count the men
Men don’t like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Step Twelve, The Twelve Step Program In the second to last meeting of the course “Social and Cultural Foundations”, Dr. Butler told us, not once but twice, because some in the class didn’t understand what she said the first time, that “It is not necessary or possible to learn about other cultural groups in the abstract.” It was a concept worth repeating, I believe, because it was exactly this attempt to categorize and somehow “own” knowledge about other cultural groups that most of us in the class had hoped to gain from it. Instead of having a better handle on minority groups, for example, we have learned about the inadequacies of all stereotyp