"No one saves us but ourselves. No one can, and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path." This is a quote from one of my favorites...Buddha. There is not much I can say about Buddha, other than he was a very wise man. Oddly enough, there are no known writings of Buddha. Everything we know about him was written down after his death. In fact, it was about 400 years before anyone had put anything to paper. Given that's the case, I think many of his sayings could be made by his acolytes as well and then just attributed to Buddha. At any rate, it is very hard to tell. What can be told is that he is the spiritual leader of his own religion.
To get back to the quote, the first line really stands out to me. I have seen this one in action both in regards to me, and my wife, among others. No one can save you unless you want to be saved. When I first met my wife, we dated for about two weeks before she told me she was an alcoholic. At that point, she asked me for help in stopping. The problem was, she didn't really want to stop. She was using the alcohol to self medicate herself from some of her other anxieties and addictions. My wife had addictive personality disorder. She struggled with anorexia, binge eating, compulsive buying, hoarding, jealousy, gambling and other behaviors. It was both sad and scary. We did not know that all of these behaviors were tied together. We tried to battle the alcoholism and the anorexia, and I always found it a good sign when she ate heartily (it wasn't). It oftentimes led to binge eating when I wasn't around, and eventually to depression as she gained weight. This inevitably led back to drinking as she tried to regulate her mood or her appetite with the booze. I could not save her... although I naively tried. I didn't know the extent of her problems and I did not know or believe that she had to do it on her own. I swept the house for bottles, took her to doctors and psychologists, social workers and AA meetings. Nothing worked. I was often told that she had to hit bottom to be helped. That is a large crock of bull. The bottom for my wife was when she died. By that time she had lost her husband, her family, and her happiness. No one saves us but ourselves... it is so true. But don't be afraid to be there for someone and to bring them to people and places where they may be able to learn how to save themselves. It is one thing to have to save yourself... but it might be impossible to do if you are never given hints on how to do it. When my wife (then my girlfriend) asked me to help her to stop drinking back in August of 1999, she helped me to save myself. You see, I too was an active alcoholic at that time. I was functional, and more of a heavy binge drinker (weekends mainly), but I had been drinking fairly regularly since my preteens and I put myself into AA when I was nineteen while in college. I was sober on my 21st birthday, but eventually went back to drinking because I felt my social life was suffering without the drinking. I was bored with drinking by the time I was 33, but doing it anyway. I was looking for a reason to stop, and Sharon inadvertently gave me that reason. I have not had a drop of alcohol in nearly seventeen years. And with God's help, I will not have any for the rest of my life. In the end, although I could not save my wife, I ended up saving myself by trying to help her. Sadly, I feel that back then I did not care enough about myself to save myself, but because I cared so much for her, I saved myself to help make it easier to save her. I didn't realize back then that that is what I was doing. I don't think Sharon ever realized it. Since, as Buddha says, "No one can save us but ourselves", maybe it is a good idea if we are having trouble saving ourselves to find something or someone we value more than ourselves to save... as long as in saving it/them we have to save ourselves as well. I know it sounds odd. But it seems to have saved me seventeen years ago. Possibly, if I had suggested that idea to my wife back then, it might have saved her as well. I don't know. And I don't think I ever will know. All I can say is that I am here now. I somehow saved myself way back then. And with the grace of God I will continue to do so... One day at a time.
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