Creeping Mold
Daily Meditation 585–10/3/2023
This meditation is aimed a bit more towards younger readers.
When we are young and full of vim and vigor, we often view our whole life as ahead of us and that we are invulnerable.
We will always have our good metabolism.
We will always have our good looks and magnetism.
We will always have freedom.
As such, we party it up, sleep around, and overindulge daily, perhaps.
Let this be a caution, a warning to you:
Addictions creep up on you like a silent, undetectable mold in the dark corner of the basement of your soul.
One day you’re 19, paying your friend’s older sister to get you 5 O’clock gin under the table and secretly smoking cigarettes behind your parents’ back, living a wild, free mantra.
Before you know it, you’re 38, a moody alcoholic who wakes up at 5 a.m. to sneak 3 shots of liquor in so that you’re sober before your 9 a.m. shift. You’re coordinating your two children’s pick-ups and drop-offs with two exes who you share custody and are asking for more. You smoke two packs a day and your home hasn’t been cleaned in five weeks.
A simple pleasure, today — masturbation, porn, cigarettes, alcohol, weed, coke — seems under your control and you believe you have the power to stop any time.
But that pleasure, tomorrow (or the next, or maybe next year…) eventually places its boot upon the neck of your life, it instead gaining all the control and power over YOU.
Party all you like — enjoy life on your terms, certainly!
Just ask yourself often:
Do I have any addition creeping into my life?
Because they have a nasty tendency to only reveal themselves as your addictions long after you’ve crossed that threshold…
So ask…
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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
