No matter where you are in your own recovery, I just wanted to remind you and emphasize the importance of relationships. 

I’m not talking about just romance, I’m speaking of relationships with all that this new life has to offer. “Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps,” I’ve come to have a relationship with God as well as everyone and everything that surrounds me. I have become part of life at last. Now that I’ve been delivered from the root of my problem (selfishness and self-centeredness) I have been given not only the power to help others but the desire to have real honest and open relationships with all around me.

I look at it today as making investments in my life on a daily basis. 

I awaken each morning and rekindle my relationships with my God, with my wife, the sunrise and new day, my job and those who’s path I cross, etc. It is these relationships that are my investments and it is these investments that have been paying huge dividends to me for the last 12 years. And just where did these relationships start for me? In treatment. It was there, with my peers also attempting to save and change their lives, that I came to trust others and thus have real relationships with other human beings. It was from those beginnings with fellow alcoholics and addicts that I took my new ‘tools’ out into the rest of world and began ‘investing’ in everything and everyone.

My world and worldly ‘account’ is overflowing with all the dividend checks that have been cashed. 

I pray that I will never forget those early relationships for it is from those that my life is as full and rich as it is today. I am still in contact with those people all these years later. I am still a part of their family forever as they are a part of mine. Just as I don’t ever want to forget my last debauch, I never want to forget what has brought me to this happy, joyous and free life I get to lead today. In my own way of saying it, “Don’t forget what brung ya!”

I have known loneliness like few have known. Relationships, real relationships guarantee that I need not ever to know that again. Invest in yourself and others. Enrich your life through relationships. Rekindle those early days of discovery and trust with those that were doing the same alongside of you. You and them will be better for it.

Tharin Smith, a grateful recovered (and invested) alcoholic/addict