I have had a good few hours with fellowship in the picture. My fellowship of anonymous people who desire sobriety and not insanity. My fellowship with one criteria for entry and staying is simply a desire to stop drinking. What a simple form of entry, yet one of the hardest for most humans who do drink to every think of joining, unless driven to the madness of drink itself.

We can have too much of a good thing. We see the events unfold around a Football world cup, the behaviour we have when we have a few drinks and the consequences of emotions let out, when usually we keep our emotions in check. The consequences from violence to love and all expression in between. The utter folly of expression when we feel we can get away with tolerance and opportunity. The very expression of the true and inhibited inner self, rolls out in unfettered ways leaving us vulnerable to our basest of needs and wants exposed.

This thing of need, to the measure of sufficient, the wants above sufficient and where we step into greed territory. Where needs become wants through deprived and turgid circumstances, when needs must, the devil drives. Our inner devil which needs to desire and be able to let go. And in letting go express pent and sometimes torrents of emotion released in cathartic painful jolts as the world is unprepared. As you and I are unprepared for the gush of need and want. We fight with our insides out when we find a way to release sometimes appropriate and inappropriate feelings and means of expression, for we let risk have its way and show another element of the truth of us. We can be full of things we have stored up and let them out, release them without hindrance of sense or folly we are making.

This folly of storage too, where we hold on to things inside which are made big with time. The things we might yearn and never achieve, the yearning making the desire all the stronger. For human capacity is such that we make our needs bigger than they are, we give way to imagination and the rest of our dreams when we release without care. And of course attention to our near and dear who often feel the fall out of our nasty mess inside. Or we have them in check, on hold awaiting their departure to a world which has not outlet for our insides coming out. These things we learn in our fellowship, and how we may deal with our inside feelings and worse how we find expression can be to ours and others detriment. Violence seems to lurk everywhere when we are thwarted as does love and peace. And the devil inside is our will and our saviour for inside the devil is a kernel of all that is true of being human. We are good conscience and the devil incarnate, all there and all awaiting expression if we find the key. The key to our path is not in insanity, that is a return to drink and fixing, it is the key in acceptance of reality and acceptability. Not in the denial of our inner selves, more a working out how we fit and belong in our civilised world and how we can behave best, with the worst of folly still in us. There is no one alive today without their inner demons, or their equal of good conscience somewhere residing and making good the majority of choices we have. As long as we know and are aware of ourselves, today and now!

I went to an early meeting yesterday, and much good news on things to do with family and new borns coming into the world. I have not experienced parenthood but feel the parents joy as they speak of new life. New life somehow makes for fresh beginnings. And in these fresh beginnings and parenthood comes the need to be appropriate in ourselves and how we are. And for me the talk of being appropriate is good and worrying all at the same time. For in appropriateness we forget our inner being where all of our psyche dwells, all, the deep and surface, the stuff of all our living.

New life brings responsibility to new parents and a sense of ever present joy is tempered with ever present dangers of life. And how to be a good parent helped understand concepts of good and living well to good patterns. Good patterns are quite necessary and sometimes it behoves us to follow them. Yet our insides may still scream for recognition of our true feelings. The true feelings are not always about comportment to life’s rules.

Some are engaging in parenthood for the first time others for the last time I feel. And still a theme of care and due attention diverts to holding back on pent up thoughts and lack of expression.

While I conclude some of our dangers in expression lead to inappropriate behaviour, there is much to be gained understanding our feelings as they occur and working them out as they are better right sized for the moment of now. Better sized and appropriate. We are luck if we get there to using our feelings as they are and not to appropriate guidelines and codes of ineffective practice.

I spoke out with relish needing others views and forms of expression where it works and is seen as good and where its got ugly with age, for we learn much from our ugliness. Our ugly where we have stifled our pain and often our opportunity for ordinary joy day to day…

It is the curse of modern living to conform to standards so set in traditions which hold us back, we can learn from expression of the relevant and pertinent. What is pertinent is to deal with our baggage and let it go. And in doing so let go the inappropriate for us. When we do we find our moral compass or exclusion from the worlds where we have no place anyway.

Fear can drive us mad when we do nothing to sort out those horrid disturbances inside us. We are better, profoundly better off in expression in a safe place of learning inside our fellowship, all of us miscreants to an extent…

And much talk in the day with other people and another meeting in the evening, where I learned in a good small group of people how similar my life experiences have been to theirs and how different we are as people.

Valuing diversity comes without prejudgment which curtails and stifles us and not our prejudiced subject. Our blind prejudice will keep us from growing when we recognise our folly. What a relief to find purged much of the rubbish of years in ego’s drift, not so solid now and flushed away with good conscience.

Lucky me! And more this morning coming!