The adjective, daily, jumped off the page from last night’s reading from Martha Cleveland’s book, Chronic Illness and the Twelve Steps (1988) and prompted a closer study. Such subtle directives are often heard during CPA meetings and yield valuable insights of recovery, if explored. Such, also, speak to aspects of multidimensional words whose meanings lap across borders, signifying other realities that shimmer with vibrancy.

This morning, I picked up the proffered suggestion and paged through the Twelve Step Ingredients in our other text, Recipe for Recovery (2015). Sure enough as I vaguely remembered, the adjective daily was affixed twice to daily practice, and once to daily application and once to daily commitment in Steps Three, Seven, Ten, and Eleven.

An embarrassing truth surfaced: how often my morning prayer slides me into the next twenty-four hours, without daily committing my stuff to the scrutiny of the Twelve Steps. It’s precisely my stuff, with its unseemly friction, which draws Higher Power’s course correction and contributes to my ongoing conversion of heart, an arduous process.

Only daily application of the Twelve Steps, I remind myself, can bring about critical changes in the bedrock of my psyche, pockmarked by decades of negativity that distorted thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors and that made living with me difficult.

Happily, I do not work alone. My sponsor and others of like-mind have supported me in this spiritual fellowship for years.

So this daily discipline continues steadying my wobbly knees as I move through my end-time and anticipate the Big Book Study in the Sky.