The Crying Baby

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it's the same problem you had last year."

John Foster Dulles

There may be many things we want to alter in our lives.  But unless we stop talking and start doing something, those changes won't happen.  We can start by setting a small, easily attainable goal.

"My philosophy of life is No Pain, No Pain."

George Carlin

Resistance to pain = Suffering

Me.  I said that.  Everyone said that, maybe, could be!  It's talking to me, that pain.  It's sending me a message.  It's keeping me safe from physical and emotional danger so why do I spend so much time trying to get rid of it?  Today I try to look right at the pain, to pay attention to the pain, to figure out whether it's the good pain, trying to keep me safe, or the bad pain, the useless pain I hallucinate up in my mind worrying about non-events?

When I first started traveling on long overnight flights of many hours I would occasionally be seated near the dreaded Crying Baby.  The best antidote to a long flight on a cramped airplane is to sleep as much of it away as possible.  A Crying Baby doesn't make the task of falling asleep while seated upright on a jostling aircraft any easier.  Initially, I thought that the babies were doing it just to fuck with me.  Then I thought the airlines were scrutinizing the seating chart so that they could put as many babies in my section as possible, assuming that at least one of the babies might morph into the dreaded Crying Baby.  Then I read at one point that the human body is more programmed to notice a change in incoming stimuli than to notice the stimuli itself.  If I try to ignore the Crying Baby I am hyper-aware of any fluctuations in the volume, tone, and timbre of the wailing but if I just relax and pay attention to the howling my brain gets bored and begins to start to ignore it.  It doesn't ignore it completely - it's a Squalling Baby! - but it removes most of the anger and frustration I feel which is really what is keeping me awake.

Honestly, I'm more irritated by the two boring people sitting behind me who spend half the flight droning on and on about absolutely nothing.  The Crying Baby, at least, might be responding to the pain in the inner ear that can occur with the change in cabin pressure as the plane ascends and descends.  The baby has a reason to cry while the two adults talking loudly about absolutely nothing in a cabin full of people who are trying to sleep?

They're going to hell.

What Is Good Behavior In Alcoholics Anonymous?

One of my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous is a young woman - young-ish woman - who grew up with two alcoholic parents, the father taking a powder and leaving his kids to fend for themselves with no guidance or support after subjecting them to years of disdain and disbelief.  This kid got herself involved with a piece of shit A.A. member - yes, we have them, too - with a ton of sobriety and a big presence in one of our local villages.  Fair enough and not unheard of.  SuperK and I got things going when we were both pretty new in sobriety.  So it happens.  And it happens because we're in an environment where everyone is sharing or should be sharing, anyway, very intimate feelings of sadness and loneliness.  If you're a piece of shit predatory type then you're in a pretty fertile hunting ground.  I should say this: I do not know the guy.  Maybe he's just a minor piece of shit and not a huge piece of shit but I'm gonna stand by my classification until proven otherwise.  This mixing of all kinds of personalities and histories is, of course, one of A.A.'s greatest strengths while being the source of the occasional great pitfall.  A man with a lot of sobriety should have not behaved this way; or should have behaved this way only with great caution.  He is still a presence at two meetings that my friend visited regularly but is now too abashed to attend.  He's fine, apparently, blithely unconcerned about how this relationship affected someone new enough that drinking again could be a plausible outcome for his victim.

Here's the point of my judgemental screed:  I'm not a close, day-to-day friend with this woman but we talk at the Keep It Complicated meeting regularly so I was floored when I found out she had suffered this abuse at the hands of this guy.  I was floored that I didn't know one solitary thing about the relationship that she was invested in so heavily that it really caused some emotional damage when it ended.  She mentioned it not once to me.   Did anyone know about it?  Did her sponsor know about it?  I know her sponsor very well and find it hard to believe she would have watched this behavior without weighing in with some pointed, unequivocal advice.  We try not to give direct advice but if you tell me that you're going to feed your whole arm into a wood chipper I'm going to say something.

Okay, here's the real point, finally: Talk to people!  Tell people what you're doing!  Get some fucking feedback, for chrissake!  If someone talks to me about something going on I really, really try not to be dismissive or critical but what I can do is to ask a lot of good questions that allow the other person to hear themselves talk out loud about what they're doing.  How many times have I listened to myself talk to another member and after a bit thought: "Well, I sound like an idiot."  The other person did not have to tell me I'm an idiot.  I sounded like an idiot to myself.

Irony. Irony!

Irony:  A contrast between expectation and reality.  (Ed. Note: Yeah, alcoholics don't do that shit.)  (Ed. Note: See that?  THAT'S irony.)  It occurs when a statement means an opposite of what was said or an outcome is the reverse of what is expected.

Have I mentioned before how important I think it is to be present, to be in the moment?  Have I mentioned before how confounding it is personally to constantly forget how important it is to be present, to be in the moment?  Maybe this is why the reminder shows up again and again in the spiritual and recovery literature I rely on.  Maybe this is why one of our most important slogans in Alcoholics Anonymous is "One Day At A Time.  I should have this tattooed on my forehead backward so that every time I look in the mirror to remind myself who the problem is I'll be reminded what the solution is.

"Too often we put off our own happiness until some event is realized in the future.  The result is a cycle of setting and achieving milestones, only to realize after each one is achieved that it failed to do for us what we had thought  it would.  This is why many great masters of all traditions have stressed the importance of living in the present moment."

The Toltecs

I ascribe to the belief that if I want to be "happy" in the future then I damn well better work on being "happy" today.  While it's OK to be a striver, to work at improving and arriving at a "better" place - a stable relationship, children, extra money, a successful career - if I make my "happiness" contingent on achieving these milestones I'm going to be in danger of screwing up today.  I have found that a "truth" in my life is that when I quit grasping at something then it comes to me more easily and more naturally.  Which can be frustrating and a good example of one of the ways my Higher Power can be an ironic, tricky son of a gun.  An example: I came into A.A. extremely broke and some extra money, some "fun" money, some "bullshit" money only started arriving when I realized I could lead a good, satisfying life without the extra.  The irony is that now that I have some of it I need less of it.

What Was I Thinking?

The more I meditate the more awareness I have.  The more present I become.  I spent very little time in the present before I got sober. Our minds are meant to think.  My mind ran hog-wild for the first thirty years of my life.  It did whatever it wanted and what it wanted, apparently, was to relitigate my past, especially concentrating on slights and insults while ignoring any instances where I might have been at fault, or to blow into the future, where terrible things were happening to me or where I wasn't getting what I wanted.  This doesn't make me bad or even unusual.  The ability to be present is not easy to achieve.  The fact that the mind does a lot of thinking is good: it prepares me for the future and it reminds me of past failures and dangers so that I can better prepare for the future.  Good for the brain and fair enough.  The misery comes when I let my mind spend every waking minute in the past and in the future because at that point I'm never in the moment.

The more I explore meditation and mindfulness the more I find that the call to be present, to be in the here and now, is Task One in almost every philosophy and religious, spiritual concern that I've ever run into and - still, to this day - I find it to be a fleeting skill.  I find myself in the past and in the future and ignoring where I am at this moment, right here, right now.  I miss everything.  I miss life when I'm in the past and in the future.  One memory seared into my white matter is of a day in the Midwest, a Saturday, where I had errands to run on one of my two days off, lots of errands because I'm a Type A, it's-never-enough kind of human being, and I can't remember if it was Fall or Spring but it was a beautiful day in one of the two best seasons when you live in a cold winter/hot summer climate, and I was putting some groceries in the trunk of my car after careening from one critically important chore to another, when I looked up at a blue sky with puffy clouds not careening along, a cool breeze touching my skin, and I thought: "I missed the whole day, this whole, beautiful, perfect day."  Some of this is okay: life's life and we have stuff to do.  You can't ignore a crying, hungry baby with a full diaper because you want to meditate but the point is to be present, to enjoy the moment as best as you can.  I did not have the ability yet to be where I was.  I was always elsewhere.  

Have you ever done something really stupid and thought afterwards: "What the hell was I thinking?"

Exactly.  Precisely.  What was I thinking?  

Who Do You Love?

One of my favorite mantras is "Love someone for who they are and not who you want them to be."  It surely releases me from a shit-ton of expectations.  I tend to create an image in my mind of how I want everyone, including myself, to behave and then I'm disappointed when they don't live up to that often ridiculous image.  It's difficult for me to not project how I'd like things to happen, but that's a hallmark of conditional love.  "If you behave like this, then I'll love you."

Today I strive to let go of the projected images I have of people close to me.  I ask myself if I love the person for who they really are or do I love them for who I think they are?

Swaggering Along

It took me twenty-five years to become an overnight success.

I've been talking a bit to a new guy who's been showing up daily.  This guy has got Game.  You know the kind of person?  Handsome, fit, wealthy, owns his own real estate brokerage firm, totally confident in his own person?  A no fear kind of guy, a guy strutting the strut.  Married with a five year old daughter he dotes on.  Just brimming with confidence and self-assurance.  (Ed. Note: This, as we know, guarantees almost nothing.  He drinks alcoholically and is attending meetings daily as a prerequisite for keeping his license after a recent DWI.  Whatever gets you here, right?)  Frankly, there's so much swagger in his persona that I'm always surprised when he shows up again.  I'm curious as to what his back story is.  What got bad enough?

The one area of his life that seems to trouble him is his marriage.  He implies that his wife is shut down, uncommunicative, with working and being a mom taking up all of her energy and time, and this state of his marriage has him concerned.  I can only imagine the damage incurred living with an alcoholic exuding that kind of confidence. I went to a high school that had a lot of rich kids and there were some classmates who were total idiots but insulated from their idiocy by their family's money, swaggering through life blithely, unaware or unconcerned that they were idiots.  I hope that he can step back and see his part in this marriage, to see that maybe the problems started with him.

I'm not All In on this dude, yet.  I like him but I don't trust him.

Hang In There

"If you view life through the eyes of an artist, then life is no longer a work of art; rather, it becomes a series of goals to achieve and contests to win.  You are happy when things go 'right' and upset when they go 'wrong.'  Viewing life this way can make for a very difficult experience."                        The Toltecs

I used to look at art - Art - with a bored and skeptical eye.  I thought it was something that needed to be "understood" to be appreciated.   I would go to a big art museum believing that I had to look at every piece of art and read everything posted about every piece of art that I looked at.  It was frustrating, exhausting, and boring, to be honest about it, standing in front of a painting, vaguely aware that the gallery had dozens more paintings to be "gotten through."  Like I can't look at the sun setting over the ocean without knowing "why" the scene was so moving.  It's lovely!  It's beautiful!  It's calming! It's a wonderful experience! I don't need to read up on why the colors are pleasing to the eye or why nature can be so centering.  I like it; I look at it; I go home and eat dinner, better for the experience, happier for the experience.

I have some art books on my desk and I try to spend a few minutes looking at art each day.  I'm trying to balance actually following through on picking up the book and not beating my obsessive-compulsive TypeA ass up when I don't pick one up - it's meant to be fun and illuminating, not a chore like picking weeds in the hots sun.  I've learned a lot about art but not as much as I've forgotten.  I was kind of agitated this morning, the prayer and meditation barely making a dent in my agita, so I picked up one of the books, looked at three pictures - Three!  Just Three! - and immediately calmed down.  I read the short blurbs on each of the pictures which cued me into some stuff I wouldn't have noted before and stuff I'll probably forget about but who cares?  These were masterful works and I enjoyed all of them, aware that sometimes a painting will leave me uninvolved.  Today, when SuperK and I go to a museum we spend an hour in a gallery, sit down and rest our feet with a cup of coffee, and then dip back in for another half hour and that's it.  We're full.  We're done.  And I've found that some of the joy comes in the reflective reaction that comes later.  I feel better after the fact than I do while I'm doing the actual looking.  The beauty has seeped in and affected me but it takes some time for that emotion to be realized.  It's akin to watching my breath as I meditate - even though my mind flits about, here and there, near and anon, I end up with a calmer, more focused day.  What's better - anticipating a roller coaster ride, dropping down that first drop, or howling about the excitement with your friends as you exit the ride?  I never want to go to an art museum; I enjoy-ish the experience when I'm there, and I'm a bigger, better, badder dude for having experienced the experience.

Try this: pick out an incredibly famous piece of art, pull it up on your computer, and then look at it for ten minutes.  That's a long, long time.  You'll get bored and antsy but hang in there.  I bet you'll notice something in minute seven that you missed at the outset.  I read about a guy who went to a museum and spent an hour in front of a painting for 100 days.  I could not do that but I enjoyed reading about it.  He became kind of a minor celebrity at the museum.  He noticed things that eluded him on the first few viewings.  He hung in there.

Hang in there!