My New Sober Life

 

An important aspect of maintaining a sober lifestyle is setting and achieving goals in different areas of one’s life. The hard work doesn’t stop when someone leaves treatment; this is actually the time when it is important to apply the skills that were learned during one’s program. One of our recent graduates shares the goals he has been working on since completing his time at Narconon.

“In my months since graduating from Narconon, I have been concentrating on the following Goals that I set for myself:

Family:

A couple of weeks after my graduation, my wife and I flew to see our daughter, son-in-law, and our two little grandsons. We had a great time sight-seeing, and I performed a bunch of projects our daughter and son-in-law have not been able to get to—they have only lived in their new home for a few months. Of course, we did our best to spoil our grandsons—the older had just turned four, and the younger turns one next week.

Our son is temporarily living with us as he works on his Master’s Degree—whenever he has the time he and I go target shooting, which is something we both enjoy doing. My wife and I are very happy with him doing this as he has been teaching mathematics at the high school and middle school level for almost 15 years and is ready for a change. Other than our trip to visit our grandsons, we also flew to Hawaii for a couple of weeks of vacation, and we had a great time.

Hobbies:

I have remained extremely busy with my many hobbies. I have done a great deal of work on my model train layout, mostly fixing different areas of scenery. I have also remained busy with my firearms collection, primarily cleaning everything as I have been rather lax in doing that. This probably doesn’t sound like much, but as my collection consists of over 200 firearms, it is a big task.

My Home:

I have managed to complete several tasks around our home that I had been putting off. To put this into perspective, our home is over 6,000 square feet, so there is always something to be done.

Exercise:

I have managed to walk a couple of miles about every other day. When the weather doesn’t cooperate, I have a pretty nice gym set up, including a ski machine that I work out on for half to a whole hour every day.

Reading:

Since graduating from Narconon, I have managed to read four and a half books.

Volunteering:

I’m still retired, but I seem to be busier than ever. I have found that several of our neighbor’s children have needed a little tutoring help with math or physics problems, so I have done that.

Sobriety:

I have managed to stay clean. This is not to say I have not had urges, but when I do, I find something different to do. All in all, I am very happy that I went to Narconon. I truly feel like a re-born person, both mentally and physically—I feel I have value again.”

Thank You,

Dan