TIME

BY DR. GEORGE BIRTCH

Time passes at the same speed for us all. Each hour has sixty minutes and each day is twenty-four hours long. Yet it does not seem that way. Some hours fly by so quickly that we wonder where the time has gone.
Others drag so unmercifully that we become fretful, frustrated and bored. Any allotment of time has to be measured, not just in minutes or hours, but in terms of our experience of it. It is even possible to get so engrossed in what we are doing that we forget to measure time at all.

Any person who has spent much time drinking and then stops is obviously going to have a lot of time on his hands. At first this is a frightening prospect. The thought of all those evenings with nothing to do, all those weekends to be faced without benefit of chemical escape is enough to dismay even the bravest optimist.

In fact, the reality is sometimes even worse than the anticipation. More than one person has returned to "the sauce" out of sheer boredom. The first way to think of time, therefore is to plan how to use it. Evenings don't have to be a bore or weekends a drag. Not if you use some imagination. Not if you plan.

The operative word is plan. Know in advance just what you are going to do. This is something more than deciding how you are going to put in time. It is planning how to take advantage of the fact that all that time is available to be used in such stimulating and challenging ways that life takes on a whole new flavour. Sidney Katz calls it "life style modification". The other attitude toward time is one of respect. The old proverb declares that time heals all wounds. (My daughter once had a motto hanging in her kitchen which said that time wounds all heels!).

There are some things, including recovery from addiction, that can be achieved only over an extended period of time. There is no short-cut. There is no way in which habit patterns developed over a number of years can suddenly be replaced by a set of new ones. This goes against our ingrained impatience.

We live in the day of instant solutions. There is a pill for every pain. Fast relief is the motto that attracts. Instant coffee, instant breakfast, instant biscuits have a ready market.

When I was a boy two trains a day went through our town headed for Toronto. If you missed the one in the morning, you waited for the one in the evening. Now there is impatience if you miss a slot in the revolving door. It is not easy to wait patiently for time to do its healing work. Yet it is the necessity that each person faces who is working to recovery.

Some relapse because they expect too much too soon. Many more have discovered that, if you do respect the healing power of pay off is tremendous.


Don says: We live in an age of instant needs, need to rush to work, need to be successful there, need to have the perfect family, need to be somebody that is admired by all, needs, needs! Once one gets into this groove, there is a never ending spiral, and life goes by without you even noticing. Stop, smell the roses, you don't need the alcohol, the admiration, you just need to cool it and take one thing at a time, relax, and enjoy life!