6. Reasoning
6. REASONING
There are many times that reason told me to do one thing and my worst impulses urged me to do another. Had I listened to my reason, I would never have needed to work the Twelve Steps and you would not be reading this now.
Bill Wilson explained that in alcoholic insanity, the very best thinking was often accompanied by very poor thinking. I don’t know if he coined the phrase “stinkin’ thinkin'” but those words are familiar to most people in recovery. It’s the kind of thinking that gets you in trouble. What’s puzzling is that it can suddenly appear just when I am thinking in a very sane and reasonable way. On page 37, I am warned that along side my sound reasoning runs an insane idea.
The definition: “Reasoning – The drawing of inferences (passing from one judgment to another, or from a belief or cognition to a judgment)”
Those parentheses are included in the Webster’s definition. In them, I see a description of one thing passing into another, such as a belief passing to a judgment. That notion of transformation is crucial to understanding my insanity.
I wasn’t sure how to illustrate two ideas coexisting in parallel to each other (one being reasonable and the other being unreasonable). My thoughts leapt to books and how they can contain many, many different thoughts and ideas within a very tightly packed space. I have opened a book to a couple of different places because the two passages somehow related to (or contradicted) each other. The drawing is of a man using his fingers to “bookmark” two pages. Somehow, that captured the idea of “inferences” for me.