The road less traveled by

You’re at a fork in the road. You have a choice…a decision to make.

The road to the left, looks like the harder, less traveled, road … the road to the right, the road everybody else seems to take ….the easy road.

Addicts are just like most other people. We take the easy road. It’s the one we know. It’s the road we’ve been on. The road we can predict. The road where we know just how to act, we know who to call and where to go. Often, it’s the same road our parents and friends are on.

The easy road...the friendly comfortable road.

For an addict the easy road is where there are other addicts. They agree with us, it’s not our fault, it’s our parents, it’s our teachers, our siblings, the police the judges the prison masters… it’s their fault! It’s God’s fault for making us this way!

It’s the drug’s fault! Not ours.

I can handle it on the easy road. Sure, I may have a problem, but when push comes to shove, I’m a man and can back off a bit. Hey, I was sober for a month last year! I got a job interview next week … on the easy road.

On the easy road, I’m in control. Nobody tells me what to do. I know my own limits. I do it my way on the easy hi way.

For us the easy road is the one of broken promises … well, screw them! Who needs them anyways? I’ll be good!...until I really need a fix. I’ll be there…unless something better comes up. I’ll pay the rent…unless I bump into what’s his name and go to the bar. I’ll call you tomorrow!...until tomorrow comes and it’s the day after and we cant recall yesterday.

For an addict, the easy road is the road of failure. It’s a lot easier to BE a failure than to try to succeed.

For an addict the easy road is the road of pain. It’s easier to handle pain with a shot or a sniff or a smoke than face the neverending pain of withdrawal, rejection and emotional sensitivity.

Addicts are sure they know where the easy road leads. They dream of wealth and love and contentment…if only these people places and things would let it all happen!

But, ultimately, for an addict, the easy road leads only to suicide. It’s a lot easier to die than to live.

The easy road. It’s the one we know…the one we can’t seem to get off of. And, addicts are just like most other people. Most of us take the easy road.

But there is the other, harder, less traveled road.

We don’t know that road. It appears dark. It looks intimidating. Many of us have started down it a ways and found it so hard we ran back to where we left off, back on easy street.

I can tell about this harder road, because I’m on it. I’m taking it right now.

The hard road is humiliating. I had to admit to myself and to others that I was an abysmal failure. That I had lost at the game of life. That I had broken every dream God had given me and squandered every talent with which I was blessed. I had to face that I was not man enough to handle living. That a chemical controlled me and I could not control it.

The hard road is risky. I had to wager all I had and all I knew on things I did not understand and for gains which were not assured. I had to use faith which is belief in things unseen and trust in outcomes unknown.

And, the hard road is lonely. I had to give up all I knew and begin with strangers in a strange land.

So this road offers humiliation, risk and loneliness and I invite you to join me and others on it. We cannot make the decision for you but we can tell you with the authority of experience that this road is not as dark and intimidating as it may appear to you now.

Without question this road is tough at the beginning but we can also say with confidence that the tough times don’t last and the tough people do. I stumble and fall on the hard road. I cry and complain and loose faith and feel pain and loneliness…but I stay on the hard road and find that when it finally reaches the mountain I so feared, the road turns up and passes through it. I have found brothers and sisters on the hard road who help me up when I fall down. I can see that it is from the humiliation the hard road demands that I have won honor and dignity. I know now that it is by taking the risks of the hard road that I have received freedom and happiness. And it is in my loneliness, the deep loneliness of facing who I really am, that I have felt the hand of God.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference

Robert Frost

You have a choice tonight…a decision to make, tonight.

Take the road to the right, the easy road…the road everybody else seems to take .. or, take the road to the left, the harder road, the road less traveled by.