Love acts (2)

Love does not apologize. Or make mistakes. Jesus never said, “I’m sorry.”

Do I repeat myself?

A high-quality mistake is something we learn from, and which we do not repeat. Low-quality mistakes are enervations, unconscious and corrosive, often expressing a weak desire to repeat an experience.

Promiscuous

A mistake I learn from is not a mistake. I wouldn’t know that anger is a derangement and regret a waste of energy unless I’ve laid with both of them, known them under the covers. There are other ways to learn but none as terrifically good as mistakes.

Errata

It’s not a mistake to make a mistake—unless, of course, it’s repeated. Our experiences don’t bring us to the mat; repetition does.

Dependency

Step Four in AA’s addiction recovery program invites us to make a fearless and searching moral inventory of ourselves. The requirement of this inventory is but minimally met if its only yield is a laggard’s list of shortcomings and missteps. The real work in Step Four is to identify and investigate our dependencies. When a dependency is discovered, the remedial act cannot be second-guessed, negotiated or dithered over. We take an axe to its root.