During my brief sojourn as a freelancer, one of my clients was a magazine for the Association of Recovery in Higher Education. They created a national, well-organized network of Collegiate Recovery Communities designed to help young people who were recovering from addiction return to campus and successfully complete their degrees. I interviewed quite a few of those students and found their stories to be some of the most inspiring I've ever heard. There was one experience they all shared: “my rock bottom.”
Rock bottom is the point of no return, the specific moment when you realize that your current path has dragged you down to such an unsurvivable depth that you’re left with one choice and one choice only: change or die.
I feel like we watched our rock bottom play out on Capitol Hill this week. It was sickening and heartbreaking. But I have to say, for the first time in a long time I was proud of our perpetually divided Congress for coming together and performing their duty, even in the face of violence and volatility. It gave me hope that maybe we had, at last, hit our rock bottom and were ready to begin the slow and difficult climb out.
Suspicion and division and dishonesty pushed us down. We’ll need truth and justice and unity to pull us out. The question is, are we up to the climb? I think so. I hope and pray so.
Comments