July 30 2023

I know so very little, and I believe from my own experience and from observing the experience of others that peace is not related to career or financial success. I don’t always feel that that’s true, but I believe it somewhere that exists in the roots below feelings.

When I feel disrupted, unhappy, or am treading the waters of a sense of my own failure and incompetency, then my feelings say that some amount of success will be a balm to the disruption. And maybe it would be a balm, like blowing cold air on a burn. Cold air does nothing to address the repeated action of putting my hand in the fire.

I met a guy who had achieved the sort of career success that seems so far from my reach. I have thought if I reached that place then I’d be set.

But my rooted beliefs know that peace does not live there, and I saw it in that man as well. When talking to him he had an air that I recognized in myself at times, that he was unappreciated and undervalued.

I know that feeling. I feel that when my beliefs are thin, exposed, easily wounded. Of course they are, because that’s when I think my value and appreciation comes from outside of myself and away from, as we say in AA, our higher power.

That’s the place I’m writing from today. The roots of feelings are exposed.

Go back to the depths of being, Joshua. You know that rich soil.