Many of us come to Narcotics Anonymous full of regrets about our past. Our steps help us begin to resolve those regrets. We examine our lives, admit our wrongs, make amends for them, and sincerely try to change our behavior. In doing so, we find a joyous sense of freedom.

No longer must we deny or regret our past. Once we've made our amends, what's done is truly over and gone. From that point on, where we come from ceases to be the most important thing about us. It's where we are going that counts.

In NA, we begin to look forward. True, we live and stay clean just for today. But we find that we can begin to set goals, dream dreams, and look ahead to the joys a life in recovery has to offer. Looking forward keeps us centered in where we are going, not remorseful or regretful about our past. After all, it is hard to move forward if we are looking back.

The first bit of hope we experienced in NA came from a place of defeat. Using drugs hadn't worked for us. Our grand experiment of solving our living problems with mind- and mood- altering substances was a profound failure. In that dark place, though, a ray of light shone through: We could find a way out of addiction and into recovery.

Once we have been clean for a while, many of our hopes come from more positive places. We think about how much more we can accomplish with our career goals, our creative endeavors, our loving relationships. Maybe we want to sponsor more addicts or try out new service positions.

Having hope for the good things that will come our way is great, but we would do well to remember how much more precious hope can be when we have very little of it. We are bound to experience tremendous disappointments when we stay clean for years and decades, some of which rattle us to our very core. We bury parents, children, siblings, or spouses—and lots of fellow addicts. We lose jobs and relationships, we make terrible mistakes, and hurt people we love. Guilt, shame, and loneliness take up so much space in the room that it's hard to make any space for hope, even when it is what we most desperately need.

Hope is why we must stay in the practice of going to meetings, sharing, calling our sponsor, reading literature, and talking to other addicts when life is going well for us. We get to see clean addicts find their way through incredible difficulties by showing up—no matter how fragile or broken—and putting themselves in the position to receive some hope. When we find ourselves there, fragile or broken, we think of the others we have seen walk through it, and we know it can be done. We must go on—together, we can.