Perry Mason For The Defense

I listened to a guy share his Fourth Step this week.  I forgot how messy this process can be.  I didn't help things in retrospect, suggesting that he could sort of free-associate the inventory instead of using the four columns technique in our  Big Book, the result being that his self-analysis was all over the place.  It was like trying to make heads or tails of the path of a pinball when you're not controlling the flippers.  Say what you want about the four columns but they definitely add a lot of structure to the process.

I mostly listened, tossing in a comment now and then, but mostly listening - he was wound up as most of us are during our first Fourth Step, talking a mile a minute, so it was hard to get a word in edgewise anyway.  We had a short discussion about drug use: my history and beliefs compared to what the central office web site says all stirred up with the variety of opinions you'll get from different members.  He mentioned some recent cocaine use and a few concerts fueled by mushrooms and LSD.  I get it - I liked drugs, too.  Whatever.  We don't use illegal drugs or legal drugs obtained illegally.  We take great pains to make sure our health care providers know we're in recovery.  From time to time we find ourselves in situations where a pain killer is indicated but we take more great pains to suck it up and hurt a little bit before taking anything that might dull our reality.

I guess the point is this: are you trying to escape reality?

When I got home that night and began reflecting on the evening I realized it wasn't clear to me whether this drug use occurred before or after his self-proclaimed sobriety date.  The next day I bounced my suspicions off of a few trusted Program friends - all of them in my camp, the "WTF are you talking about with the LSD and cocaine camp" - and then gave this dude a call.

He's a nice man, a good and decent guy.  He's an adult with children that he takes care of and a business that he runs ethically.  His Fourth Step was frankly a little boring.  As I started to talk to him - he immediately clarified that these drug episodes occurred after his sobriety date - I was expecting some remorse or an impassioned but incoherent argument defending his ridiculous assertion that LSD use is compatible with effective sobriety.  I always stress that I'm not a spokesman for The Fellowship - I'm a dude who has found a path that works for me and - while this is a pretty standard path for people in The Fellowship - it isn't the only one that works.  I always encourage people to read a lot of literature and talk to a lot of folks, soaking up the wisdom, before coming up with a personal recovery plan.  I know good, solid members who won't work with an individual who is taking a medically supervised anti-depressant or even an anti-psychotic.  I think this is excessive but they don't - they direct potential sponsees to a member who is comfortable with this therapy and they do this in a non-judgmental way.

I felt like I was a lawyer who was prosecuting an individual wearing a black mask who had been caught with a gun standing in the foyer of a bank that had just been robbed and who was holding a bag of money clearly marked "Swag," and I was losing the argument.  He really wasn't defensive at all.  He told me that he didn't feel like he had a problem with drugs and that The Fellowship was about not drinking, wasn't it?  Period.  We talked a little about alcohol-free beer - you know the kind: it has a little alcohol in it? - and he confessed to drinking this, too.

At this point I'm sweating profusely.  I felt like the starting quarterback on a team that was four touchdown favorite finding myself down two scores at the two minute warning.

"What the fuck is going on here?" I thought.

I told him I didn't think he was sober.  My default position when working with someone new is to encourage them to talk to a lot of other people.  I also suggest bringing up the conundrum as a topic in a meeting and seeing what kind of feedback the group gives you.  I realized that I didn't know of any specific prohibitions on drug use and sobriety dates.  The Program is careful to point out that we deal with alcohol only and encourage drug addicts to look elsewhere.  We agree that our Twelve Step Program can help people with all kinds of problems - including drugs - but maintain that we are only experts in quitting alcohol.

I wonder if I became this guy's friend and this has hindered my tendency to speak plainly, even if it may sound offensive?  Normally I have my finger on the trigger when someone tries to advocate for casual drug use.

After I got off the phone I took a ramble on the world wide web, including the official web site of our Fellowship, to see what I could see about drug use in sobriety.  I was quite taken aback to find nothing specific from any site I would consider official.  There were a bunch of articles from private recovery programs and from recovery chat rooms and long threads among random individuals that had all kinds of opinions, some sane and some quite crazy, but nothing from the mother ship.  Drugs came up often but only in the context that we don't profess to fix drug addicts and that we don't give medical advice to people who may be taking a medically-prescribed drug that some of us frown on.

Hopefully he's pondering all of this.

I'm not giving him any chips marking recovery milestones, I'll tell you what.

Happy Birth-iversary

Anniversaries marking sober time - or "birthdays" as they incorrectly say here in Vacation City - are an important and sugar-fueled milestone.  Birthday means you get a birthday cake and everyone sings Happy Birthday.  Locally most people "take a cake" on Saturday when the meeting is quite large although you can low-key it during the week on your actual birthday.  I guess the thinking is that if you're going to be the center of attention you might as well do it in front of a big crowd.  I have enough trouble with my ego as it is so I opt for the weekday celebration, but I DO go with the cake - sugar is sugar, just as good at 7AM as any other time.  Frankly, I've never had a problem with 7AM cake - I've never been fooled by sugar being packaged into a round, fried piece of cake called a donut. 

"Wow, Seaweed is getting a monstrous donut instead."

"Donuts.  Is there anything they can't do?"  - Homer J Simpson

However, I don't really like the phrase "take a cake."  That would indicate to me that I would get to take the entire cake home, free to eat big, thick slices at my leisure, not share it with other people who may be fingering it or coughing on it.  We should say "share a cake" or something like that.  Maybe it should be the Birthday Boy's choice.

"Happy Birthday to Seaweed who is exercising his option to take the entire cake home." 

There's also a tradition here of gathering some people together in the kitchen area to actually bring the cake out into the meeting room, with a big flourish, candles burning and everything.  I think the idea is that this is to honor people that have helped you in your sobriety in some significant way.  I don't like this, either - it seems cheesy in a Look At Me kind of way.  I'd be tempted to see how many crews I could be a part of.  

"Man, that Seaweed is helping everyone."

So for my anniversary I took a cake on the actual day, some random weekday that I can't remember any more.  There's a woman at the meeting who has some significant disabilities - she's here without being all there that I've taken the time to talk to her over the years, listening patiently because she also has some significant family problems.  She can't hear very well so I think she can feel isolated.  I should point out that she gets to the meeting early every single day and gets the room ship-shape.  We're buddies at this point - she always talks for a long time and she always effusively thanks me for listening.  I don't mind - anything that stops me from thinking about myself for a couple of minutes is a good thing, and she's not the easiest person to listen to so members aren't generally flocking around her after the meeting.

I asked her and her alone to bring out my cake on my day.  She speaks of the honor to this day.

No Bullshit Angels

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:  A type of psychological therapy which states that thoughts, feelings and behavior are all connected, and that individuals can move toward overcoming difficulties and meeting their goals by identifying and changing unhelpful or inaccurate thinking, problematic behavior, and distressing emotional responses.

Dammit!  Everything I read comes back to a goddam Gratitude List, a goddam Inventory, a goddam personal inventory.  If you think bad shit then you become bad shit.  And who exactly is in charge of my own thinking?  I am what I think.

The obvious question: why think bad thoughts?  It's all me.  It's not you.  Why do I blame you for something I'm doing?  

Guilt:  A feeling of distress or responsibility for some offense, crime, wrong, etc.; an unhappy feeling, whether real or imagined.

There it is: imagined.

Imagine:  To believe in something created in one's own mind.

Isn't god created in one's own mind?  

Our meeting topic yesterday was how to come to an understanding of a power greater than one's self.  I myself, personally, fall into the category of Once Had Faith But Lost It.  I was a pretty religious kid and for the longest time I took a great deal of comfort in my faith.  Of course, I overemphasized the negative parts while giving the positive parts short shrift but it was still an anchor in my life, one I turned to with great frequency over the years.  Growing up can be pretty scary, especially for an overly-sensitive, fearful child, and the idea that some big force has your best interests at heart can be very reassuring.

Alas, as alcohol began to have its way with me, overwhelming the positive messages and lessons from my religion, I became disillusioned.  There are, after all, plenty of priests and pastors with drinking problems, men and women of great faith who cannot stop drinking by dint of their faith alone.  I'm happy to report that, over time, I was able to piece together different parts of religion, philosophy, and theology into a spiritual program that works for me.  It was fun yesterday listening to all the ways that people have accepted a faith that works for them.  Lots of different paths, that's for sure, none of them right and none of them wrong.  This is why The Fellowship is so effective: we encourage everyone to find their own conception of a higher power.

Right now I've picked up this flock of angels.  One of the Old old people in the book I read about aging talked about these angels that took care of him.  It reminded me a lot of The Program; all I had to do was substitute "higher power" for "angel" and his concept sounded identical to mine: do what you can with what you've got, solve problems to the best of your ability, and then step back and let life spin.  He let his angels work on whatever problems he had.

What is the correct term for a group of angels?  You know - like a pride of lions or a murder of crows?

Anyway, my flock can be a sullen, sarcastic crowd.  They look angelish - white robes, wings, leather sandals laced all the way up their calves, the whole get-up.  They sit around me, partially obscured by clouds or mist or fog, on different levels, in a vaguely suspended but not flying airborne way, reading the paper, and do a lot of grumbling and bitching.  They eventually take care of business but not always on my time frame.  They move off to their task mumbling among themselves, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, gesturing my way as they get to work.  My angels definitely don't sing and you almost never see them smiling.  I don't think this is because they aren't happy; they just aren't frivolous.  

These are no-shit, practical, hard-working angels.

The Literature Speaks Some More

"We reviewed our fears thoroughly.  We put them on paper, even though we had no resentment in connection with them."

"The minute I stopped fighting or arguing I could begin to see and feel."

 "We had not even prayed rightly. . . We had always said Grant me my wishes instead of Your will be done.  At no time had we asked what god's will was for us; instead we had been telling him what it ought to be.  It is when we try to make our will conform with god's that we begin to use it rightly.  Our whole trouble had been the misuse of willpower.  We had tried to bombard our problems with it instead of attempting to bring it into agreement with god's intention for us.

Here are the preconceived notions that I have about life; namely, that it's all about loss and decline, when in reality it's all about acceptance and gratitude.

Some pain acceptance is going to be a good thing.  It's a fact of life that there is going to be decline - I've been experiencing it in a non-catastrophic way over the last twenty years.  Some decline is going to be inevitable.  Something is going to get me.

  
Gratitude
An extensive study was done where a group of people was asked to record their thoughts about gratitude while another group wrote down the stuff that annoyed them.  The results?  The group that kept a Gratitude List began to report a greater sense of optimism and well-being, and the effects actually began to show up in their blood pressure and heart rate and sleep patterns. The longer the gratitude people persisted at this exercise the the more pronounced the results.

One important caveat must be pointed out:  "It was not enough to be conscious of one's advantages; one had to be grateful for them.  Advantages alone - even awareness of them - weren't enough, perhaps because they can be lost.  Gratitude, on the other hand, was an affirmation that the world gave you things, and might continue to do so."

Happiness

Happiness shouldn't require effort on my part, and it should come as a kind of peace.  All I have to do is sit back and let it wash over me.  Life gives me what I need if I'm wise enough to see that.

Here's the strategy: spend my time and energy on the things that give me satisfaction, not lamenting those that I could once do - or experience - but now can't.  "Selective optimization with compensation:" make the most of what I have and compensate for what I've lost.

Happiness is not something to go out and seize.  Happiness is taking satisfaction in what is available right now, not hitching it to the future.  Too often my definition of happiness looks forward.  The future is tricky - the future might not come.

"I don’t understand happiness only as someone just always smiling and laughing.  It’s more like inner happiness, where you feel you have done everything right in your life, you haven’t made anybody unhappy.  You have a certain kind of peace and balance in yourself, and you are not anxious about what will happen the next minute or the next day.  You let it go and you don’t worry, and you lead a balanced life.  If you want the next moment where everything will be better, then you’d better do this moment right.  People often asked him if he was happy, he said, and his response was always the same: of course he was.

Live in the Moment

I won’t think about what I have to do - I'm just going to do it, hoping that’s what my fate is.  If I have any problems that emerge I'm going to try to leave them alone for now, let time work on it.  I shouldn’t dwell on anything that's problematic - I'm going to try to leave it alone and as time goes along see if it straightens out by itself.  I cannot deal with it, so you, god, now it’s your job.  You work on it and I'll do something else.  And usually they do it.  Trust—that’s what I advise if anyone asks.  You have to trust your higher power.”

It never occurred to us that we needed to change ourselves to meet conditions, whatever they were.

Sense of Purpose
Those with a sense of purpose had deteriorated little in their memory scores even when the cellular damage in the brain was identical to those with dementia.

Becca R. Levy, a psychiatrist at Yale, has found striking correlations between people’s attitudes toward old age and how they fare in their later years, with effects starting as early as middle age.  In one study, those who had more positive views of old age, measured by how they answered the question, “When you think of old persons, what are your impressions?" tend to experience more happiness as they age.

Continuous Action V Sustained and Personal Exertion

Here are a few of the nicknames I've acquired over the years: Half-Measures Seaweed; Half-Ass Seaweed; Not-All-There Man; Doesn't Appear To Give A Shit Dude; etc., etc., etc.

I'd like to achieve great success while lying on the couch.  And a one day turnaround would be nice.  Maybe I can achieve great success while sleeping.  That would be really great.  I remember my first sponsor, tired of my incessant bitching, telling me to go home and wash down the kitchen walls.  "Just do something," he said.

I demurred, preferring talking about doing something to actually . . . you know . . . doing something.

Action:  Something done so as to accomplish a purpose; fast-paced activity.
Exertion: An expenditure of physical or mental effort.

Our literature's take on this?  Ah, not so much . . . 

"Like all the remaining Steps, Step 3 calls for affirmative action, for it is only by action, that we can cut away the self-will which has always blocked the entry of God . . . into our lives."

"Nothing short of continuous action upon these as a way of life can bring the much-desired result."

"More sobriety brought about by the admission of alcoholism and by attendance at a few meetings is very good indeed, but it is bound to be a far cry from permanent sobriety and a contented, useful life."

"All of the Twelve Steps require sustained and personal exertion to conform to their principles and so, we trust, to God's will."

Hi Ho Hi Ho it's off to work I go.

Looking Closely

Inventory:  To take stock of the resources or items on hand.

"Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes.  Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person entirely.  The inventory was ours, not the other man's."

I tell the story often of a friend of a friend whose sponsor would answer the phone and simply say: "It's not them - it's you" before hanging up.  I'm not sure that truer words were ever spoken.  I don't like to look at myself, preferring to poke and dig and pry at your shortcomings instead of look at my own. If you want to take a minor matter with a loved one and escalate it into something more catastrophic simply go on the offensive when your behavior is questioned: "Yeah, maybe I do that, but you . . . "  Those of us in long-term relationships know how often something big results from something small.

An elephant is a mouse built to an alcoholic's specifications.

The best defense is a big offense.

"The first thing apparent (once the inventory is begun) was that this world and it's people were often quite wrong.  To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got."

"Some will object to many of the questions posed, because they think their own character defects have not bee so glaring.  To these it can be suggested that a conscientious examination is likely to reveal the very defects the objectionable questions are concerned with."

It's Not Them

News Flash: Alcoholics Suck at Relationships!

"But it is from our twisted relations with family, friends, and society at large that many of us have suffered the most.  The primary fact that we fail to recognize is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being."

I'm telling you that is some no-shit straight talking.  It's not possible to misinterpret the intent of the phrase"total inability."  That is a clearly articulated sentiment even for for someone as argumentative and self-satisfied as me.

But wait!  Order now and we'll say the same thing in a slightly different way!

"We have not once (Ed. Note: Not once) sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society (Ed. Note: I can hear my dad yelling "You are totally useless!").  Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide beneath it.  This self-centered behavior blocked a partnership relationship with any one of those about us.  Of true brotherhood we had small comprehension." 

And, of course, nothing is ever my fault . . .   I can spot a defect in someone else at a thousand yards while ignoring a defect the size of a Buick afflicting my own personal self.  It's no wonder I have trouble in my relationships when I'm perpetually finding fault in everyone else.

"Our present anxieties and troubles we cry are caused by the behavior of other people . . .   To see how erratic emotions victimized us often took a long time.  We could perceive them quickly in others, but only slowly in ourselves."

And even if someone else is to blame . . . 

"Or if my disturbance was seemingly caused by the behavior of others, why do I lack the ability to accept conditions I cannot change?"

Why, indeed.

Productive Striving

Strive:  To try to achieve a result: to make strenuous effort; to try earnestly and persistently.

And from a slightly different perspective  . . . 
Strive:  To struggle in opposition; to be in contention or dispute; to contend.

Sounds like war, doesn't it?

Productive:  Capable of producing something, especially in abundance; yielding good or useful results; constructive.

Ah, "good," that's the troublesome word.  Too much nuance there, too little certainty.

Long, rambling talk with SuperK last night about being productive, although we hid the reality of the discussion under layers of justification.  We are both strivers in our own way - we look at the thing produced differently but the basic intent is the same: who is doing the most in the best possible way.  Who is filling dead time with stuff.

This idea of a productive use of time is so distinctly American.  Here we waste time.  We kill time.  We don't linger over something with anyone.  We don't know how to idle.  We're on to the next thing, checking our cell phones as we sprint off.

If you want to watch Sports Center for an hour . . . what the hell?  Watch Sports Center for an hour.  The world isn't going to grind to a halt.  I watched the highlights - again - from a college football game played in 2015 yesterday.

I once read the frustration a writer experienced while trying to describe what she was doing to her Type A hyper-competitive banker husband, trying to help him understand that she needed time to let her mind figure things out: "Just because you see me sitting quietly doesn't mean that I'm not doing anything."  I'm such a linear person - make a list, get to work, cross shit out, move on, relentlessly.  I can't tell you how many times I've gotten to the end of a day and realized I had no idea how the day passed - I was just careening from one successfully accomplished task to the next.  I find myself getting frustrated when something stops this progress, even if it's something pleasant.

I feel like saying to the neighbor's granddaughter the next time she runs over to see me: "Uh, I'm fucking meditating?  Could you leave me alone?  I have to accomplish this task!" instead of popping out the ear buds and enjoying her very enjoyable company for a few minutes.

I got somewhat defensive during my talk with SuperK which probably means she was successfully probing a sore spot.  It also may true that she's holding me up to a standard that - while appropriate for her - may not be a great fit for me.  It's like telling someone that they're doing it wrong if they don't like a particular album that really rocks your world.  Master of Reality comes to mind.

Productivity is in the mind of the beholder.

A scene from childhood . . . Running outside and flopping on the ground under a big elm tree in our front yard.  It's summer time, I have a few months of not going to school ahead of me, I don't have anything to do, it's really about as great as it gets for a kid, although I'm in a contest to see who in my class reads the most books over the break, a contest that I used to trounce my main rival, Sherry somebody.  I remember lying there, a breeze moving the branches around, filtered sunlight dappling my face, listening to the familiar noises of my neighborhood.

I'm not sure it's possible to be happier than I was right then.  Maybe I should spend the afternoon lying in my cactus patch listening to the palm fronds rattle . . . 

Acronyms For Everybody!

Pray:  To petition or solicit help from a supernatural or higher being; to communicate with God for any reason.

I like that "supernatural" is in the definition.  It gives praying sort of a Batman feel.  I also like the "for any reason" part.  I'm pissed.  How about that?  I can just harangue God for an hour or so?  I don't think the pastors of my church would like the "any reason" part.  It sounds pretty permissive.

In my religion we were given the acronym ACTS: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.  Yeah, I didn't use that. My personal acronym was SHIT: scream, hit, intimidate, threaten.  Supplicate this, dude.

Some quotes for ya . . . . 

"At no time had we asked what god's will was for us; instead we had been telling him what it ought to be."

And a little later . . . but not that much later . . . which suggests that our founders knew we weren't paying attention . . . 

"We had not even prayed rightly.  We had always said 'Grant me my wishes' instead of 'Your will be done.' "

Now that we're sitting upright in our chairs, fully attuned to the lecture: "It is when we try to make our will conform with God's that we began to use it rightly.  Our whole trouble had been the misuse of willpower.  We had tried to bombard our problems with it instead of attempting to bring it into agreement with God's intention for us."

There's a great Simpson's episode where the beefy gym coach only allows the kids to play a game called Bombardment.   The game consists of the coach smashing balls into the kids with great force.  

That's how I pray.

But yet . . . 

"The minute I stopped fighting or arguing, I could begin to see and feel.  We trust infinite god rather than our finite selves.  We are in the world to play the role god assigns.  Just to the extent that we do as we think he would have us, and humbly rely on him, does he enable to match calamity with serenity."

OK, this has gotten awfully close to being too religious-ey even for me.   I am glad I got to capitalize the word SHIT.  It brings some carnal earthiness to the passages. 

Family And Such

I read this a while back and it definitely gave me some comfort.  The author is a normal, non-alcoholic guy, and he doesn't know how to deal with his family, either.  It's not just us drunks.  Apparently other people feel clueless when it comes to family.

In some ways my relationships with family members improved when I moved 2500 miles away.  And this is mostly on me - I'm not the easiest guy to sustain a long-standing and intimate relationship with.  I'm prickly.  I'm impatient.  I'm an insufferable know-it-all.

"My parents had both fled communities where family ties were strong and long, for New York City, where individuals were autonomous and self-invented.  We performed the rituals of family the way some people attend church, because it’s the right thing to do, rather than because they feel the spirit.  It worked fine until it didn’t.  Then my mother was on her own, with three sons who thought being on your own was the goal of human existence.  We weren’t opposed to family warmth; we just didn’t speak the language, and didn’t know where to learn it.  Put a gun to my head and it would never occur to me to invite my mother for a week at the beach."

Scrub Jays, Eight Year Olds, and Armenians

I've come across a lot of suggestions in my reading that being grateful is sort of a good thing.  This isn't amazing.  What is amazing is that the realization is usually stupefying, hitting me as sort of an electric shock, a jolt of recognition.  

I'm not sure I'm living on a higher plane if it surprises me, over and over, time and time again, that I should be grateful for things.

"Wow," I think.  "That's a great idea.  I should try it some day."

Seriously, I do have a Gratitude List that I ponder every morning.  It's full of big, astounding things, incredible gifts that I've been given, major things like health and a good spouse and friends and a Very Fast Car.  As with many routines, however, musing on my blessings can become a rote exercise, a practice where I'm saying the words superficially and not absorbing them deeply.  I often take these blessings for granted.

So one of the books suggested a daily, one-off, unique expression of gratitude.  I've been doing this and also forgetting to do it sometimes.  I've never been comfortable with someone, say, gushing over a beautiful sunset.  It seems emotional, superficial, too touchy-feely for me.  But ever onward and upward, right?  Quitting drinking seemed like a stupid idea a long time ago and look how that turned out.

One day I tossed a few peanuts on the ground.  This local bird - the scrub jay - bright blue, a real talker, swooped in, grabbed a nut, and went to work with Germanic purpose.  He banged the nut on the ground until the shell fractured and he could get at the seeds inside, which he then banged on the ground, eating the small shards that resulted.  After a few peanuts he grabbed an intact shell and flew off, bringing dinner to someone else, I assume.

One day the 7 year old granddaughter of our best-friend neighbors wandered over.  Like a lot of kids she doesn't know what to make of my stream-of-consciousness, non-sequitur bullshit but she always runs over and hangs out for a while.  I got a couple of big hugs.

Yesterday an appliance repairman showed up to fix my balky stove.  He had a heavy accent.  I always compliment people on their accents and then try to guess at their heritage.  Armenian.  I guessed Greek.  Was I in the game?  He didn't seem to be offended.  He did seem to be surprised that I knew so much about the Caucasus and wanted to visit the area some day.  We had a free-form, wide-ranging conversation about peoples and travel and his life.  This dude - this dude repairing my general electric gas range, speaks four languages.  Four as in one more than three.  Armenian, English, Russian, and one other that I forgot because I was so blown away at the first three.  He's pondering a class to learn Spanish.

He seemed pleased when I told him: "You should be working as a translator somewhere."

When he was wrapping up his work and stood and said to me very formally: "I like my job because I get to meet people like you."  We shook hands and off he went into the night.

Pascal? Kafka? Really?

So if you tell me to do something I won't do it.  Don't ever tell me what to do if you want me to do it.  I won't take my hand off a hot stove if you imply that it would be a good idea.

After mom and dad and Kenner died I felt the need to explore a solution, some solution, part of a solution, in a venue outside of The Program.  My recovery is not only in the rooms of recovery.  Our literature urges us to make use of all of the tools for good, right living that the world offers up: doctors, religion, psychology, philosophy, music, art, nature.  There's a ton of good shit out there.

I read books on grieving.  I read a few on depression and anxiety.  I read a book on aging with gratitude and grace that blew me away.  Now I'm reading one called: "The Art of Wasted Day" by Patricia Hampl, an American essayist.  I'm being blown away by this book as well.  It is written by a striver and is resonating with a striver like me, a dude who knows the concept of "It's Never Enough."

Life conceived—and lived—as a to-do list. This is the problem. I sense I’m not alone. Fretful, earnest, ambitious strivers—we take no comfort in existence unfurling easefully as God intended. For the worker bee, life is given over to the grim satisfaction of striking a firm line through a task accomplished.  On to the next, and the next. Check, check. Done and done.  It explains—and solves—nothing to call this workaholism.

The beauty of arriving awareness of consciousness existing for its own purpose, rippling with contentment and curiosity. One’s own idiosyncrasy reveals itself as a pleasure, without other value—but golden, amusing, integrity hard-won and now at its leisure.  Hand on heart, this life of the mind, lolling—tending to life’s real business. This latter stage of existence suggests that the ultimate task, the real to-do, is: waste your life in order to find it.  Who said that?  Or said something like that.  Jesus? Buddha? Bob Dylan? Somebody who knew. 

This particular battle between striving and serenity may be distinctly American. The struggle between toil and Real Life.  I was mistaken. The essential American word isn’t happiness. It’s pursuit.

How about just giving up? Giving up the habit of struggle.  Maybe it’s a matter of giving over.  To what?  Perhaps what an earlier age called “the life of the mind,” that phrase I fastened on to describe the sovereign self at ease, at home in the world when I decided to embrace that key occasion of sin—the daydream.  Happiness redefined as looking out the window and taking things in - not pursuing them.  Taking in whatever is out there, seeing how it beckons.  And letting it go.

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet." 

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks.

"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Pascal

Seaweed: IN CONTROL. No Doubt About It.

Control:  Power to manage something.

Here was a lesson in giving up the myth of control.  If you believe you are in control of your life, steering it in a course of your choosing, then old age is an affront, because it is a destination you didn’t choose.  But if you think of life instead as an improvisation in response to the stream of events coming at you - that is, a "response to the world as it is" - then old age is more like another chapter in a long-running story.   The events are different, but they’re always different, and always some seem too much to bear.

I'm struck by how the fact of aging successfully seems to dovetail so closely to the best suggestions about spiritual growth.  Do the best you can.  Guide yourself in the right direction, but don't force things.  Go with the flow.  Don't mourn what you don't have.  Don't rage against the machine.  In almost every instance I could replace "old age" with "sobriety."

Here are some quotes from our Book . . . 

We know that no real alcoholic ever regains control.
He has lost control.
He wished above all things to gain self-control.
As we redouble our efforts at control, and continue to fail, our suffering becomes acute and constant.
All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals - usually brief - were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.
We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking.

I am NOT in control.

The tendency to sustain mixed feelings, rather than to try to resolve them, is a valuable component of elder wisdom, a recognition that life doesn’t have to be all good to be good, and also that it never will be.  Troubles are always with us, and getting rid of this one or that won’t make us happy; it’ll just move another hardship to the head of the class.  This is the distinction between “happy in spite of” and “happy if only,” the former being a benefit and the latter a handicap.

I think this is the difference between being being happy and pursuing happiness.  I think this is an example of why I should focus on what I've got and not on what I've lost or won't ever get.  I need to think: "I'm happy right now."

Remember: Your sole purpose in life may be to serve as an example for others.

"The minute I stopped fighting or arguing I could begin to see and feel."

The lesson is to find happiness not in the absence of pain and loss, but in their acceptance.  As simple as this lesson sounds, I find it one of the most daunting to live by.  Most accomplishments in my life, especially my professional life, have come from rejecting my dissatisfactions - not accepting adversity, but striving against it.

"She kept her spirits up by accepting her pains as a part of life - not barriers to happiness but accompaniments to it.  If she was going to have any contentment in her life, it was going to come with arthritis pain and her other losses.  Happiness, she said, is when “you have a nice place to live in, and you have enough money to spend and a good family.  That’s it.  And when you’re young, you fulfill your dreams.  I traveled.  The world is so wonderful, so different.  You should travel around the world and use up your money for sightseeing."

They became more selective about how they spent their time and whom they spent it with.  Mingling at cocktail parties or chatting up strangers no longer interested them.  They weren’t looking for new friends or networking for new contacts.  Another was that they became became less self-concerned, and more aware of being part of a larger whole.  Instead of being lonely, they valued having time alone for contemplation.  

Receiving is much harder than giving, but this fact is seldom recognized in mainstream American society.  

Another Word It Never Occurred to Me to Look Up

Happy:  Content; satisfied; enjoying good of any kind, such as comfort, peace, or tranquility.

Happiness is not something I have to go out and seize.  I make a lot of mistakes when I try to acquire happiness.  I find myself trying to seize more stuff, more money, power, and sex.  I feel better when I take satisfaction with what's available right now instead of trying to hitch my happiness to something in the future.  I'm always looking forward instead of being content with what I have right now.  The future, to point out the obvious, might never get here.

Remember: it's always the darkest right before it goes totally black.

Serendipity

Another entry in the "you cannot make this shit up" department . . . 

This is a very big department in my world.

On Monday the meeting format is to read a paragraph out of the book as a topic generator.  The guy today read this:  "We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick.  Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too.  We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  We avoid retaliation and argument.  We wouldn't treat sick people that way."

As luck would have it I was moved to speak.  Sitting right behind me was a man whose nickname begins with "Poor."  As in: "Hi, I'm Poor Seaweed."  I know - it's not a great nickname.  At one time it was kind of tongue-in-cheek funny but in my five years here I've never heard this guy do anything but bitch about the circumstances of his life.  I mean we're supposed to get better, right?  My patience - wafer-thin on my most tolerant day - had been steadily eroding with Poor Dude.  He also spends about half the meeting fucking around with his cell phone, egregious enough in my book but then he usually shares.  I'm not going to listen to you but I expect you to listen to me.  A hanging offense.

One of my schticks when I talk in meetings is to mention that I care a lot more about myself than I do about anyone else.  I hope that most people know I'm mostly joking in this regard but also trying to make sure that I stay personally honest about my oblivious self-absorption.  Everybody thinks about themselves a lot - I just want to make sure that I don't go overboard with it.  

As I finished this sentence Poor Dude yells out: "No shit!"

This would have been funny in a small circle of friends chatting after the meeting but in a large group it was quite disruptive.  I wasn't offended by the comment - I was offended by the delivery, the timing.  It caused a reaction - people laughed, a couple of conversations started up, there was a general hubbub.  My train of thought was obliterated and this is hard to do to me.  I'm pretty quick on my feet and can weather a lot of chaos but as I had a bit of a resentment against Poor Dude anyway and as he broke a few of my cardinal rules of meeting protocol I was enraged.  I'm not kidding - I was pissed.

I turned around, right in the middle of a meeting with 50 attendees, and said: "Are you sharing now?"  I waited a couple of beats and added: "Go ahead - the floor's all yours - do you have anything else you want to say?" and then I just looked at him for what seemed like a long time.  I'm not sure if the background noise I could hear was uncomfortable tittering or a continuation of the general disruption but I was too furious to parse it out.

I tried to continue my share but I had to bite it off.  I was simply too angry at that point to talk about the passage trying to help me learn the importance of not getting angry at someone else.

Poor Dude - who I consider a friend and who is genuinely a nice man - apologized to me after the meeting.  I thanked him, told him I'd get over it, then flatly stated that I was angry.  I could tell he felt bad.  His behavior reminded me that there is a lot more to this Program than not drinking and going to some meetings.  There's a lot of work to do or I'm going to get stuck in the mud - I'm going to be repeating the same behavior over and over.  Upward and onward.  No treading water.  No dog paddling.

I talked to a few friends after the meeting and also called my sponsor about this incident.  I wanted to know if I seemed unreasonably angry.  Newer people said I didn't seem that bad, that it's hard to get your train of thought broken like that.  One guy with some time said something along the lines of "Poor Dude needs to keep his fucking mouth shut."  My wife's sponsor said that he acted like a real jerk.

I'll tell you this: once I was angry I was not in charge any more.  I could feel things spinning out of control.

The grouch and the brainstorm were not for us.

Getting Pretty Deep In Here

Grateful:  Appreciate; thankful.  (Ed. Note: Are you kidding me?  I was expecting a grotesquely involved definition, not these two simple words.  Sigh.  Another attempt to complicate a simple concept foiled!)

Thankful:  Showing appreciation or gratitude.  (Ed. Note: D'oh!  I'm trapped in a semantic loop of circular definition logic!  I'm stuck!  I can't escape!)

I am learning a lot from this book on the very old.  Man, these people have a lot of wisdom to share.  I'm enjoying the fact that the author began this exercise with many of the same preconceived notions that I have about aging; namely, that it's all about loss, when in reality it's all about acceptance and gratitude.  Man, I hate those concepts.  The hair on the back of my neck is standing at attention just thinking about gratitude.

An extensive study was done where a group of people was asked to record their thoughts about gratitude while another group wrote down the stuff that annoyed them.  The results?  The group that kept a Gratitude List (ever heard of one of those, Program People?) began to report a greater sense of optimism and well-being, and the effects actually began to show up in their blood pressure and heart rate and sleep patterns.  Wait, it gets worse . . . er, better.  Worse if you're not doing one of these things every day.  The longer the gratitude people persisted at this exercise the the more pronounced the results.

One important caveat must be pointed out:  "It was not enough to be conscious of one's advantages; one had to be grateful for them.  Advantages alone - even awareness of them - weren't enough, perhaps because they can be lost.  Gratitude, on the other hand, was an affirmation that the world gave you things, and might continue to do so."

Contrast this to my normal mind set: that the world is out to screw me.  I'm going to lose what I already have, not be given additional blessings or the ability to transcend the difficulties that will inevitably come my way.

In a later post I'll parse out the subtle differences between a positive attitude on one hand, and the always-getting-screwed attitude on the other.

Another interesting study took MRI brain scans as people experienced nice and good things.  Some subjects were given a free, extremely delicious piece of pie - it was observed that the pleasure reward centers in their brains lit up like a Christmas Tree.  The study then gave other people a smaller, somewhat crappier piece of pie but a piece of pie delivered by a loved one.  There was still activity in the pleasure part of the brain - noticeably smaller - but now it was seen that areas that record social satisfaction also became engaged.  The person who ate the crappy pie actually enjoyed it more.

So caveat emptor: if you're always looking for more bigger pieces of pie good luck with all that.

But let's not go overboard and be idiots about gratitude and happiness, either.  We're all the sum of our own personal genetics and the experiences we lived through when we were growing up.

"Researchers believe that each of us has a general “set point” or average level of happiness that we hover around through our lives’ ups and downs.  If something good happens - say, we win the lottery - we’re joyful for a while, but eventually we return more or less to where we were before. Ditto with setbacks.  This set point, which seems based on some combination of genes and environment, explains why some people can be happy in dire circumstances, and others miserable in enviable ones.  But there is some evidence that we are not slaves to our set point - that we can nudge it upward by regular acts of gratitude or altruism, and by not brooding on our troubles."

Brood:  To dwell upon moodily and at length.

One Day At A Time

The longer I'm at this thing, this life, the more I have come to believe that it all boils down to One Day At A Time.  I seek and search and stumble across the reminder that now is all I have. It's everywhere - philosophy, religion, self-help, meditation.  Get yourself into the moment.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.   Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land.  There is no other land; there is no other life but this.  Henry David Thoreau

I like that the old old people in the book I'm reading right now have all gravitated towards this idea: today is what I have.  No sense messing around in yesterday and even less messing around in tomorrow, a day which may never come.  Don't focus on what you can't do or don't have but on the things that you can control, the things right in front of you.  And don't heap these things with expectations.

Forget yesterday, prepare for tomorrow, live for today, take a nap this afternoon

I Feel Happy!

Happy:  Enjoying good of any kind, such as comfort, peace, or tranquility; content; satisfied; having no objection.

I look up words and I often end up doubled over in laughter.  If you had asked me to provide a definition of "happiness" I would have come up with a lot of extreme adjectives which I guess is befitting of a man who loves to be on the knife edge of things.  I wouldn't have used words like comfort or peace or satisfaction.  Happiness is getting what you want - a lot of what you want - not being satisfied with what you have.

I've been reading a steady selection of non-fiction books that seem applicable to some of the difficulties that have existed in my own mind, if not in actual reality.  I'm not even sure that calling them "difficulties" is the right approach - a more appropriate phrase would be "shit that's going on that isn't to my liking."  I've read books about depression, dealing with anxiety, gaining some perspective on the aging process, processing the grief caused by the death of loved ones, but wait! There's more!  Order now and receive a set of ginseng gutting knives!!

SuperK is often skeptical when I start to dig deeply into something that I'm struggling with, believing that I'm looking for outside, professional validation of whatever bullshit I'm currently trafficking.  The book I'm reading now is called "Happiness is a Choice You Make."

The following are a few thoughts from the old old individuals who make up the heart of the book.

I don’t understand happiness only as someone just always smiling and laughing.  It’s more like inner happiness, where you feel you have done everything right in your life, you haven’t made anybody unhappy.  You have a certain kind of peace and balance in yourself, and you are not anxious about what will happen the next minute or the next day.  You let it go and you don’t worry, and you lead a balanced life.  If you want the next moment where everything will be better, then you’d better do this moment right.  People often asked him if he was happy, he said, and his response was always the same: of course he was.

But he chose not to dwell on his problems or spend time with people who did.  He mostly avoided people his own age . . . because they tended to talk about their physical ailments or those of others.  His ailments took enough out of him; why should he give them more of himself willingly?  Happiness didn't require effort on his part, and came as a kind of peace.  All he had to do was sit back and let it wash over him.  Life gave him what he needed if he was wise enough to accept it.

Fred hadn’t always felt this way. When he was younger, he said, he thought happiness was something he had to go out and seize.  It led to a lot of mistakes in his life, mostly out of restlessness with what he had.  He described instead a view from old age—taking satisfaction in what was available right now, not hitching it to the future.  My definition looked forward; Fred’s found fulfillment in the present, because the future might not come.

Then this insight gleaned from all of the interviewees . . . 

Their strategies often boiled down to the same thing: spend your dwindling time and energy on the things you can still do that give you satisfaction, not on lamenting those you once did but now can't.  Gerontologists call this "selective optimization with compensation:" older people make the most of what they have left and compensate for what they have lost.

Experience helps older people moderate their expectations and makes them more resilient when things don't go as hoped.  When they do have negative experiences they don't dwell on them as much as younger people do.  Researchers call this "the positivity effect."

Sir Laurence Seaweed-ier

I'm amused at the actor/director references in the literature.  Maybe our founders were frustrated thespians.

Try this on for size:

Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way.  If arrangements wold only stay put, if only people would do as he wished, the show would be great.  Everybody, including himself, would be pleased.  Life would be wonderful.  In trying to make these arrangements our actor may sometimes be quite virtuous.  He may be kind, considerate, patient, generous; even modest and self-sacrificing.  On the other hand, he may be mean, egotistical, selfish and dishonest.  But, as with most humans, he is more likely to have varied traits.  

What usually happens?  The show doesn't come off very well.

Let's call this one the Control Freak.  This individual has trouble realizing that it's hard trying to control the world.  It is a very frustrating exercise.  People do not like to be told what to do.  I HATE being told what to do - why do I think that others would be different in this regard?

And a bit later on . . . but not as far down the road as you'd think.

More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life.  He is very much the actor.  To the outer world he presents his stage character.  This is the one he likes his fellows to see.

And this fine fellow is the Bullshit Artist.  The BA has to work very hard to survive.  It's incredibly difficult constructing all kinds of alternate realities and then trying to remember what you've done and what you've said - allegedly - in these little worlds.

Remember: if you tell the truth then you don't have to remember what you've said.

An update, as I continue my reading . . . 

"It was as if were actors on a stage, suddenly realizing that we did not know a single line of our parts."

One of most recurring dreams - and this from a guy who almost never remembers any dreams whatsoever - finds me in school.  I'm late for class, sometimes weeks late, I don't have the books, I don't even know where the classroom is, and I'm trying to figure out how I can get out of this pickle.

Driven by a Beating

In one of those wonderful twists of fate a guy asked me to give him a hand working through The Steps at the same time I was working through The Steps to deal with some of my own stuff.   I'm an insufferable ass who loves to tell people what to do irregardless of whether or not I have any facts backing up my instructions so you can imagine how much more insufferable I become when I'm actually currently reading the literature that is helping me justify the stuff I'm making up.

I've had to moderate my technique here a bit in jolly, happy, social Vacation City where "working The Steps" with someone means getting together - in person - and reading through The Steps.  This has required a weird transformation for me, being a child of the sullen, private, solitary Old City environment, where the attitude was more along the lines of "There are two books; the instructions are very clear; do some reading and then get writing and don't call me unless you get stuck."

I have found in my careful reading of our two books that there is a lot of repetition.  Apparently the founders weren't too confident that we were going to pay attention to what we were reading or in our ability to retain any knowledge of what we had just read.

Here's an example of a trend, one where it is being suggested that we don't give ourselves too much credit for finally staggering into our first meeting  . . .

"So it is by circumstance rather than by any virtue that we have been driven to The Fellowship . . . "

Driven:  To have moved (something) by hitting it with great force.

A bit later . . . 

"Faced with alcoholic destruction, we soon become as open-minded on spiritual matters as we had tried to be on other questions.  In this respect alcohol was a great persuader.  It finally beat us into a state of reasonableness."

Beat: To strike or pound repeatedly; to inflict repeated blows; to knock  vigorously or loudly.

So we're beaten and driven into The Rooms by alcohol.  Sounds familiar.  I don't remember being too happy as I walked into my first meeting.

"To to doomed to an alcoholic death or to live on a spiritual basis are not always easy alternatives to face."

You have GOT to love alcoholic thinking.  The elder statesman says to the newcomer: "Here are your choices: you can keep drinking, trying to blot out the miserable facts of your hopeless situation, until you go insane, are locked up, or die alone, on the streets, in abject misery.  Or you can accept spiritual help."

The newcomer thinks for a minute: "Can I get back to you tomorrow on that?"