Who Knows?

I have a friend in A.A.  - a male friend, yes, I have a lot of those, too, trying to stay out of hot water with SuperK this morning - who is early in sobriety and about the age my child would have been.  He had just lost a grandmother that he was very close with and - to add grief to misery - he is dealing with a woman that he adores who is pulling back from the relationship to work on her own stuff.  He's the sweetest kid in the world, hard on himself, prone to overthinking things, prone to believing that everything is his fault .  .  . in other words like most of us.

I sent him a note this morning.  If I were to speculate I would guess he's blaming himself for the end of the relationship, wondering what he did wrong, wondering how to revive things, and - failing that - certain he's never, ever going to find happiness with a partner.  What do you say to staunch that kind of blood flow, that kind of self-inflicted misery?

I return over and over to the notion that pain and loss and death are facts of existence and that I do well if I learn how to sit with the feelings instead of fleeing from them or trying to change them or burying them with external substances.  It's hard to be uncomfortable, damn hard, no one likes to be uncomfortable, and alcoholics absolutely abhor anything distasteful.

I'm reminded of a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the knights storm a castle and come under withering fire and after a moment King Arthur starts yelling: "Run away!  Run away!" all the knights join him in this chant and they all run away.

I always encourage people to sit with their feelings, take a good, hard look at them, and try to figure out what the lesson is, no matter how painful or objectionable those feelings are, how irritating it is when they say something you don't want to hear.  Maybe his lesson is that this isn't a relationship with real potential.  Maybe the lesson is he's not ready for any kind of serious relationship right now and - holy shit - maybe he's one of those guys who isn't wired in a way that he'll ever be happy with a long-term partner.  Maybe the lesson is that the kind, loving action at this moment is to think of the well-being of another person and not spend so much time thinking of his own damn self, that the right course of action will open up sometime in the future.

Who knows?  He doesn't know right now.  I sure as shit don't know.  All I can do is assure people that if they stay the course, live a kind, stable life, that they will reap untold benefits.  I have literally never met a long-timer active in a recovery program who says it hasn't been worth it.  Never, not once.

Here's the Toltecs: "When we try to hold on to beliefs that no longer serve us, the result is suffering.  Trying to hold on to old beliefs just because they're familiar is easy to do; we prefer the known to the unknown; the status quo that's OK to the new adventure that might fail.  But following your heart will never lead you astray."

Start Surrending

The word surrender has a negative connotation.  It implies having a weakness or deficiency, the final act of a loser.  I beg to differ.  I see it as the art of letting go, of giving up  the ideas of what should or shouldn't be.  It is giving up the fight when fighting is useless.  I also see that surrender shouldn't make me a doormat.  I'm not going to start letting people walk all over me.  I plan on moving through life changing the things I can and not worrying about the things that I can't.

Surrender: To stop resisting.

Revealing a Little Bit at a Time

I'm constantly amazed at how difficult it is for new people to share what's going on in their lives.  We really seem to resist sharing the nuts and bolts, the mundane minutiae of our lives with other people.  I chat frequently with a 45 year old guy - the man who was raised in foster care and does not know who his parents are - who has been in an on again/off again relationship with a woman in A.A. for a long time.  I love both of them and think they're good people trying to learn how to maintain a healthy relationship after enduring difficult childhoods and then drinking at life for many years.  Here's the thing . . . the manifestation of how hard new people make it to help them . . . I am constantly flummoxed to hear that the relationship - it was definitely over last week or was it definitely back on last week, I can't keep track of all the sudden, jarring twists and turns, feints and weaves - is back without a word or a hint being shared, with me, anyway.  The episode that made me laugh, ruefully, anyway, was hearing that my buddy came home one day to find all of his stuff in a pile out in the garage - that relationship sounded over to me - and then receiving a few pictures of them happily hanging out together.  WTF, right?

I don't believe that he's being purposefully deceptive or trying to hide something - I think he doesn't consider bringing anyone else into whatever conversation he's having with the world.  I know I didn't.  I had parents who weren't that engaged in my life - and that's on me as much as it's on them - so I was used to doing whatever I wanted, whatever I thought was best, all of the time.

That's Going to Work?

"As we go through our day we pause if we feel upset or filled with doubt, and ask for the right thought or action.  We constantly remind ourselves that we are no  longer running the show.  We say to ourselves many times each day, 'Thy will be done'  We are then in much less danger of dear, anger, worry, self-pity, or foolish decisions.  We become much more efficient.  We do not tire as easily, because we are not burning up energy foolishly like we did when we were trying to control everything in our lives without help from a Higher Power.

It works - it really does."

I can just hear the new person saying: "What?!  That's not going to work.  Are you telling me that works?"

I like that the word foolish shows up twice.

Foolish:  Someone or something lacking good sense, judgement, or discretion, often appearing silly, unwise, or irrational.

Courage

Often life goes in a direction I couldn't have imagined.  The question then becomes: how do I react when this happens?  Am I open to seeing that life had better plans for me than I did?  Or do I mourn and grieve and bitch and lament, thinking that everything would have been better if only this had happened?

This is a rhetorical question.  Of course I mourn and grieve and bitch and lament.  Just for not as long as I used to.

From our Daily Reflections: "One of the definitions of courage is the willingness to do the right thing in spite of fear.  Courage, then, is not necessarily the absence of fear."  Courage implies firmness of mind and will.  Courage is the ability to control fear and be willing to deal with something that is dangerous, difficult, or unpleasant.

Yeah, well, there's some scary shit out there.  Fear can be productive.  I was messing around with the electrical connection on a cheap lamp I bought in a developing country when it occurred to me that there were three possible outcomes: 1. I blow a fuse and burn the house down.  2.  I electrocute myself.  3.  I throw the thing away.  Please note that none of the options include me successfully fixing the lamp.  There was no way that was going to happen.

"When I was drinking, I deceived myself about reality, rewriting it to what I wanted it to be.  Deceiving others is a character defect, even if it is just stretching the truth a bit or cleaning up my motives so others will think well of me.  In other words, I have begun not practicing deception."

"Remember . . . it's not a lie if you believe it."  

George Costanza explaining how he was going to beat a lie detector machine.  When Jerry asked him how he could do the same thing George scoffed and said: "That's like going up to Pavarotti and saying: 'Teach me to sing like you do.' "

The NEW Promises. The Old Promises REVISED. Something!

Here are our beloved Promises from the Plain Language Big Book:

"If we are painstaking about Step Nine, we will be amazed before we have made amends to half of our list of people.  We will find new freedom and new happiness.  We will not regret the past or wish we could forget about it.  We will understand the word serenity and we will know peace.

No matter how badly we have behaved in the past, we will begin to see how our experience can benefit others.  Any feelings of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.  We will lose interest in selfish things and begin to take an interest in helping other people.  Self-seeking will slip away.  Our whole attitude and outlook about life will change.  Fear of people and of money worries will leave us.  We will know how to handle situations which used to confuse or worry us.  We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

Are these extravagant promises?  We think not!  These promises come true among A.A. members every day - sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.  They will always come into our lives if we work for them."

Work?  Work?  Nobody said anything about work!

Sometimes real fucking slowly.

I have always objected to the assertion that these are not extravagant promises.  I think that they're extremely extravagant.  They're extravagant as hell.

I really like that the qualifier "before we are halfway through" is further explained to mean half way through the amends process.  There has been a lot of confusion about that over the years.

I note that a lot of the phrases translate word for word from the original text.  In the new version, of course, the Traditions and the Steps are not changed.  Old-timers are howling already at the apostasy of changing one word from the original book.  I can only imagine the riots that would occur if we tried to modernize the Steps.

As a kid who grew up in a Protestant church let me draw this analogy to those of you who are offended at this new offering of literature: church services were conducted in Latin - to a largely illiterate population, mind you, meaning the priest could be saying whatever he wanted because none of his parishioners could read a word  - until the 15th century.  Catholics didn't switch to the vernacular until the 1960s, for heaven's sake.  Then, the first translation was called the King James version and was packed with thous and thees and shalt nots and a lot of other stilted, old-timey language.  Eventually, this was replaced by a series of revised versions but not until the start of the 20th century.  At one point my very religious, extremely conservative parents bought me a Bible - which I read several times - that was meant to appeal to people who were a lot younger.  The cover featured hip, happy and attractive young people.  So where does this lead me as I ponder the outrage over the Plain Language Big Book?  I'm very, very, very tolerant.  I'm finding the reading to be completely inoffensive.  I don't think anything material has changed.  The message is the same - just written in the vernacular using words and phrases common in 21st century dialogue.

Big, Big Words

Resentment: A complex, long-lasting emotion combining anger, bitterness, and disappointment, often stemming from feeling unfairly treated, wronged, or underappreciated.  Experiencing a resentment is reliving an offense that injured you in the past. (The italics are mine.)   

I find it very affirming in my spiritual quests to see the same concepts repeated across the ages and shared among different philosophies and religions.  I was struck dumb recently at a Toltec passage about how nefarious and damaging resentments are to our psyche. Then, the passage quoted from the Big Book in today's Daily Reflection, is another big fan favorite: "Resentment is the 'number one' offender.  It destroys more alcoholics than anything else.  From it stems all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick."

Again, I love the choice of words: offender, destroys, spiritual disease.  Big words, big, big words with a lot of oomph behind them.  Hard to misinterpret the concept of being destroyed.