I used to like trail riding with my Yamaha 350 XT that I have sitting on the side of the house. My father in law gave it to me because he was tired of working on it. I was able to get it running great and we did quite a bit of riding with it. Ridding seasons have come and gone and it has gotten harder to start. Now it just sits on the side of the house and I look at it every once and a while and put off working on it. It still runs, but I never maintained it as I should and now I have to do harder work to get it up to par again.

Life in sobriety is the same way. I worked on recovery material, making phone calls, and going to meetings. These are the everyday things we need to do to keep our sobriety in check. So what happens once you stop doing the maintenance required? For me, it was like this. “Hello internet! I want to look up work out routines that I can do to get in shape. Oh, this lady knows what she is doing, look how fit she is, She looks good in those yoga pants as she is squatting with those weights.” Before you know it is back looking at porn again. I had relapse after relapse like this. I would then say to myself, “I need to stop. No need to tell anyone. You made a mistake that’s all this is.” Then I was into hiding everything. The importance of our dailies is to prevent us from getting back into the relapse. Relapse is not a possibility, it is a guarantee if we stop working. It does not matter if you are on day one or 10 years down the road.

Like my old bike, it needs to be maintained in order to prevent the longer hours of repairing it to run right again. Because I have not maintained it, I don’t want to go riding anymore. The same is if we don’t do our dailies; we won’t want to connect with our wives or anyone else. The difference between my bike and relapse is, it will take days and months to put ourselves back in a good sobriety, not hours.

Dailies and Maintenance are required to live a life of sobriety and there are times when they get old. That is when we need to think out of the box and to change things. Our goal is a lifetime of sobriety and joy, not sobriety and miserable.

Spencer