God . . . .

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.  The courage to change the things I can.  And the wisdom to know the difference.

Serenity:  The state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled.                                                                    Courage:  The quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc. without fear.                                                                                                                                                     Wisdom:  The quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment.

I have to remember that the Serenity Prayer isn't so much about accepting stuff and changing stuff but rather about the serenity and courage that allows me to tolerate some asshole who is on my last nerve or to walk away from said asshole without behaving poorly.  From time to time I'll deal with someone who is on my last nerve in SuperK's presence and when I ask her afterwards if I behaved okay she invariably says something like "You were a dick" or "You know what you did."  I'm usually asking for her opinion when I think I'm being dickish because I don't ask for her opinion unless I'm pretty sure that's the case.  Her Dickish Meter is usually pretty accurate.

I like the definition of serenity.  What could be better than a day where I'm calm, peaceful, and untroubled?  In fact, that's really all I'm asking for in this life.  I also like the definition of courage which doesn't say we charge a Nazi machine gun nest and almost certainly die - it's about the quality of my inner core that allows me to buck up when difficult and painful things happen to me which they most certainly will.  And I don't want to forget that wisdom isn't just about being book smart but rather combining that with the life experiences I've had and the good judgment I've obtained through the hard lessons of really messing up from time to time.  "Intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle me" in other words.

I say this prayer every morning in my Quiet Time.  Then I say it again in a way that's easier for me to understand: "God, if I'm supposed to do something today help me do it and if I'm not supposed to do anything help me wait patiently and give me the wisdom to know which is which."

Cold Turkey

The more time I spend reading the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous the more I become convinced that one of the major thrusts is that we quit blaming other people, places, and things for our problems.  Look inside!  Stop concentrating on the outside which is none of my business.

A new guy showed up at the meeting a few days ago.  One of our members who is about his age and with just a few years of sobriety talked to him for a while after we closed.  This is as it should be - a 30 year old looks at me and sees an old man who has been sober an implausible amount of time.  He did ask for my phone number, however, and not the young guy who spent some time talking to him.  I walked out with the established member after the meeting and he commented on this fact.  He sounded a little put out which I found sort of amusing.  He suggested - actually he insisted - that I text the new guy.  He suggested/insisted that I do this several times.  

As a boy who got sober in the Midwest the mechanics of The Program were a little different.  The general tone and timbre of recovery is the same everywhere, of course, but the process varies.  The men who sponsored me early on never, ever contacted me.  I never, ever had coffee with them.  They did not "read the Book with me."  If I wanted their advice I called them.  If I saw them at meetings I learned that they were taking care of their own sobriety and that if I had a question I could pick up the phone or bring it up as a topic at my next meeting.  I was pleasant to the guy badgering me but I had no intention of calling a dude one day sober.  

I thought about it and after I got down from my self-righteous soapbox I did send New Guy a quick text.  He did not reply which told me all I needed to know.  Finally, after a few days, he replied that he had decided to go "cold turkey" and that he asked his brother and girlfriend to support him and "make sure that I don't drink."  Yeah, well, okay.  I've heard this technique before - the sloughing off of the responsibility for staying sober on someone else.  There's a line in The Big Book that suggests even if we were to try to run and hide from alcohol by escaping to the North Pole that an Indigenous local might show up with a bottle of whiskey and ruin everything.

I do not chase people.  I do not give advice.  I invariably say something along the lines of "I'll be at the morning meeting if you want to talk."  I do not meet people at meetings.  I tell people where I'm going to be; that way I'm not pissed when the individual doesn't show . .  . which is most of the time.

Think he showed up this morning?  Maybe his brother and girlfriend hid the key to his straitjacket well.

For no reason other than it amuses me . . . . 

The most likely origin of “cold turkey” is that it’s an evolution of the expression “talk turkey” or “talk cold turkey,” meaning to tell someone something straight and be completely honest. It could be a classic case of a figurative expression spawning another figurative expression.  There are a couple more literal explanations, too. One suggests that the expression comes from the fact that actual cold turkey, as a dish, requires very little preparation time. The expression, then, was to compare someone’s instant quitting of a habit to the instant readiness of cold, leftover turkey.  Yet another explanation suggests that it’s the withdrawal symptoms experienced by addicts who stop using drugs—goosebumps, chills, and pallid skin—that call to mind a cold, uncooked bird. 

 

There's So Much Wisdom in the World, Stupid

 One of the books I'm reading right now as part of my daily meditation practice was written by a psychiatrist who specializes in the aging process and getting people to release their obsession with the past and what past events, people, places, and things have done to effect their lives, whether these events are real or imagined or some combination of the two.  There are a lot of smart people  in all kinds of disciplines who have a grasp on spiritual solutions to temporal problems, often coming at the same situation from slightly different viewpoints.  An idea might not make sense at first until I hear the solution from a different angle.

Here's a medical take on an old A.A. concept: "We are not what we think, or what we say, or how we feel.  We are what we do.  'When all is said and done, more is said than done.'  We are drowning in words, many of which turn out to be lies we tell ourselves or others."  I believe that this is one reason that we emphasize service so much in The Program.  It's a lot easier to say I care about you than to demonstrate that I care about you.  You care about me?  OK, show up an hour before a meeting to make coffee or sit down with me when I'm new and listen to me drone on and on and on about problems that are largely of my own making.

"We demonstrate courage in the numberless small ways in which we meet our obligations or reach out to try the new things that might improve our lives.  Many of us are afraid of risk and prefer the bland, the predictable, and the repetitive."  This is life.  Life is not an endless roller coaster ride.  Life can be boring.  I don't like to floss my teeth every night.  I don't like to pay taxes or listen to someone talk to me about something I'm not interested in.  Well, tough shit.  And the flip side of this coin, of course, is that our life is going to be richer if we take the plunge and try something new from time to time.  "Change is the essence of life."

"Most of the heartbreak that life contains is a result of ignoring the reality that past behavior is the most reliable predictor of future behavior."  In A.A. we say "if you keep doing what you're doing you're going to keep getting what you've got."  If you got drunk at the neighborhood bar you probably shouldn't go there to drink Cokes and watch Monday Night Football.

Step 4

We read from the 12 & 12 today - Step Four.  It seems to me that the extended riff for the fourth  step can be summed up, more or less, by this phrase: "It's not them - it's you."  We only read three pages a week and these three were jam packed with good stuff.

There were a few paragraphs dedicated to the two personality extremes that we often see: The Depressive and The Power Driver.  They point out that both of these extremes suffer from a look-at-me egotism; the Depressive thinks he's a piece of shit and the Power Driver thinks everyone else is a piece of shit.  Both  of them are drawing attention to themselves.  There are some super-duper lines that have always caught my eye and made me wonder and laugh at the same time; such as this characterization of the Depressive: "We wallow in this messy boy, often getting a misshapen and painful pleasure out of it."

There were a few paragraphs that emphasize the lengths to which we go to make sure we blame anyone but ourselves for our problems.  One good defense is to say that all of our character defects are caused by drinking with the implication that all we had to do to release our inner saint was to cork up the bottle.  An even better justification is to say that it's the behavior of others that cause us to drink, the implication being that if everyone else just left us the fuck alone our inner saints would be flying all over the place.  And then the coup de grace: we could find an excuse to drink for any circumstances.  When things were good we celebrated and when they weren't we would drown our sorrows.  As you can see we were good at justifying our drinking.  It was never us.  It was always other people, places, and things. 

My take on this Step is that it's where I needed to start looking at me and I needed to start trying to be honest about it.  Most of us didn't fit neatly into either category and most of us were so loath to shine a light on our rotten interiors that we could only make a start at the kind of rigorous honesty needed to do a good Fourth Step.  Many of us have done more than one; we find that some of our more subtle defects start to burble to the surface and sometimes we're just not capable yet of even looking at the ones that are obvious to everyone else.

The Shitting of the Pants

 Our early morning meeting has been struggling with a homeless persons influx for a good while.  It bugs me.  I find them disruptive and believe that the reason they're showing up is for coffee and cake and to take a quick bath in the bathroom sink.  I'm empathetic - I feel for their suffering and wish that they had access to or took advantage of the various social agencies that can help them with their nutrition, housing, and mental health issues.  Generally, I'm OK if someone comes in for the coffee and then sits quietly in the back row but these folks are talking to themselves and getting up and down and round and round.  I find it distracting.  I've brought up some solutions (in my mind, anyway) for this challenge which have been summarily rejected in our business meetings by the nicer-than- nice California crowd.

Then one Saturday our main antagonist showed up to the meeting early and lost control of his bowels in the room.  It was quite the scene, man.  He was subsequently banned from attending and in our next business meeting we finally voted to put coffee and cookies on a one month hiatus, a solution that I had been proposing since before dinosaurs walked the earth, to no avail.  

And . . . that was that.  For a few days the homeless would stroll in, usually mid-morning, check out the kitchen, and then stroll right back out.  This lasted a few days and then no more homeless people.  I know I sound a bit heartless but we're an organization designed to help people quit drinking, not one that can solve health, addiction, and housing issues.  I can safely say that most of these folks are too far gone to ever get The Program.  One dude asked me if I heard voices in my head.  It must be hard to listen to what's going on in the meeting when someone else is talking to you at the same time.

In less than a month our attendance is up 50% and we're getting some younger folks to show up.  I was ready to quit drinking when I finally wandered in but if the room had been streaked with shit or I had to wait a guy putting 15 creamers into his coffee in the kitchen I doubt I would have stayed.

Negative Thinking

 Negative:  Pessimistic; not tending to see the bright side of things (often used pejoratively).

The question often comes up about how to get rid of negative thinking.  I often wonder what the question means.  There are, apparently, other types of thinking although I can't imagine what they are.  Positive thinking sounds like a theme for a Tom Hanks rom-com or a Deepak Chopra podcast.  You can stuff your positive thinking in a sack, mister.  Honestly, this is another one of those concepts that alcoholics believe only applies to alcoholics when I bet a grade deal of the world tends to take a negative or pessimistic view of things.  It's how we survive, how we get by.   And then there's the  endless discussion of whether we are born with this tendency or whether it's beaten into us by our parents.  We do favor the latter, preferring to blame our poor parents for everything.  I have a sister who is decidedly not negative so I'm assuming she must have been raised by the wolves living in our back yard and not by our parents who screwed me up so badly.

I believe this is one of those areas where the Fake It 'Till You Make It theory comes into play.  I know I make a run through a personal Gratitude List every morning in my Quiet Time even when I'm not feeling particularly grateful.  I believe that just saying the words has an effect on my overall mood.  I also like to add the request that I be shown how I can be of service to someone else during the course of the day.  I'm not even sure what this means but it has more wiggle room than asking for ways to help someone else.  What I perceive as help is usually not help at all because I'm trying to give someone what I think they should get.

I believe this aura of gratitude and positive thinking requires some time.  I believe an Attitude of Gratitude has to be cultivated over the years.  I don't believe it happens quickly or comes easily.  I spent 28 years wallowing in my pessimism.  That bus doesn't get turned around on a dime.

Where I Belong

 I had pre-decided on Saturday that I was just going to listen and not open my mouth.  I talk too often as it is and rarely have anything coherent to say.  It's amazing that when you don't spend all of your time thinking about what you're going to say and preparing your brilliant remarks you can hear some good stuff.  The topic was Gratitude and people shared anecdotes about how grateful they are that they're no longer doing some of the stupid shit they did when they drank.

One guy used to sneak sips of wine and covered up his tracks by putting red food coloring in a glass of water and topping the bottle off until one time he drunkenly used green food coloring so that at the next meal his wife poured them each a glass of green wine.

Another guy talked about doing some research on the medicine that a veterinarian had prescribed for his dog - his dog, for god's sake - and decided that he could maybe, possible get off if he took it.

It made me think of a friend of mine who was a shipyard supervisor who would periodically use a company car to cruise around the site to check on the progress of various jobs.  A friend flagged him down one morning: "Mike, what are you doing?"  Turns out he had his company-issued polo shirt on inside out and that was the best thing about his appearance.  He also had on a pair of glasses that was missing one of the lenses and apparently the night before - when he was driving around in a black out in a company car - he threw up without bothering to get out of the car, leaving streaks of dried vomit running down the side of the car.

Yeah, we were fooling everybody.

It made me offer a brief observance: "When I was drinking if you had told me that my choices were to get up at 6 AM on a Saturday to drive to a 7 AM meeting where we'd talk about spiritual matters or to take some pills prescribed for a dog I wouldn't have hesitated to make my choice."

This is how I know I'm where I belong.