December 29
After the Good Feeling
A moving meeting leaves us certain that we want to live differently. For a while the willingness feels effortless. Then an ordinary morning comes, the feeling is gone, and the same responsibilities are waiting. We may wonder whether the meeting really changed anything. It is tempting to seek another powerful experience before doing the modest thing that has been ours to do all along.
The spiritual life includes feelings, but it does not have to depend on their staying vivid. A call can be returned on an uninspired afternoon. A commitment can be kept without a fresh sense of purpose accompanying the journey there. Sometimes meaning becomes clearer after we act, in the conversation or the work itself. We are not pretending when we practice something we believe while feeling very little. We are allowing an understanding to become part of our conduct after the occasion that awakened it has passed.
What remains worth doing after the feeling that inspired me has faded?
An ordinary morning is enough to begin from.
For the A.A. nerds: Alcoholics Anonymous, “Into Action,” p. 83; Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, Step Twelve, p. 106.