Twenty-four Hours A Day
Home » addiction story » Twenty-four Hours A DayIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed.
I already explained a little bit in my story that after I was released from my in-patient stay in a lock down psychiatric ward to detox, I attended an out-patient program. The out-patient program taught me one of the fundamentals of addiction recovery…stay in the day.
One of the best things that I learned in this out-patient rehabilitation program was what the saying “One day at a time” means. I went in there thinking that all those little catch phrases that people in recovery used kind of made me sick and I thought they were pretty corny (I still find having a bumper sticker on your car with any of self help saying it pretty lame). That was until I learned the true meaning behind some of them.
Living life one day at a time seems like a pretty obvious idea. What I soon realized was that I wasn’t living that way. I worried about stuff in the future, stuff I could not do anything about today. It was explained to me that not only is this saying giving you advice about fighting off cravings and just trying to stay sober for the day but also to really make the most of your day. It has a lot to do with not procrastinating and dealing with things as they come up.
When I “graduated” my drug class they had a token ceremony for me. This consisted of me choosing a token out of three tokens with different sayings on each and then explaining why I chose the one I did and what it meant to me. There was one particular token that just stood out to me. One side had a picture of a sun with the saying below it “Twenty-four Hours A Day” and the other side had the saying:
“Today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope”
I quickly chose that token. My explanation came so easy to me. I told everyone that this token spoke to me. The idea that if I truly do what I am supposed to do each and every day I won’t have many regrets, I won’t have anything looming over my head that I didn’t deal with when I should have and I will know that I am being the best person that I can. This is my goal in life.
Posts
May 8th, 2007 at 8:03 am
[...] I talk a lot now about how I want to live in the day. “One day at a time”, “Twenty-four hours a day“. But it dawned on me that I spend an awful lot of time going over past experiences in my [...]
June 6th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
Thanks for a great reminder, Erin. Stop by the Carnival of All Substances on June 10 and say hello.
July 20th, 2007 at 9:12 am
[...] asleep at night without the use of narcotics. It was so difficult to get through each and every twenty-four hours without using that I felt that every minute of every day I was struggling to stay [...]
May 2nd, 2008 at 3:30 pm
[...] some form or another whether it be blogging or keeping a recovery journal, they know what it is to stay in the day and they are basically trying to better [...]
June 27th, 2008 at 5:53 am
thanx for sharing this:
Twenty-Four Hours A Day
“Today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope”
… beautiful, I will try and remember that
June 27th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
isn’t it great? It’s really the one thing I try to live by.
June 27th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Also Raj - I don’t know why but I never realized you had a blog. I just ran across it yesterday. I put up a link to your site in my blog roll and you can be sure that I’ll be listening to what you have to say.