Swipe, Swipe, Swipe

The past is gone; the future may never arrive; being present is as important a spiritual concept as there is.

Sometimes I feel sorry for younger people and the endless choices they have when they're trying to figure out how to live their lives.  When I was looking for work or for a mate I was often restricted to what was presented and was available in my own little sphere of existence.  There wasn't a website where I could peer at hundreds of women on a screen, endless choices, swiping, swiping, swiping and when I looked for work there were ads in the newspaper and maybe a personal connection or two where someone knew someone who was looking for someone to do something.  If I wanted to move to another state I had to go to the library and hope they had the newspaper for Peoria, Illinois where I could peruse the Help Wanted ads.  And even that was an incredible amount of freedom compared to someone growing up on a farm before the advent of automobiles.  Church and community dances were your best bets.  You can go one step further and imagine the societies where family members got together and decided on the best fit for their children and that was that.  I've heard the divorce rate for arranged marriages is lower than for the endless choice societies.  I know some younger single people and I get the sense that they have breakfast with one person, lunch with another, and then on to dinner with someone else.  Sounds exhausting.  Sounds exhilarating which is the point and the problem, I guess.

Toltecs: "The beautiful thing about mortality is that it puts the relationships we have with others and ourselves into perspective.  In this light, any resentment we may be carrying toward another or ourselves is a type of early death.  It has often been said that 'holding on to a resentment is like taking a poison pill and waiting for the other person to die.'  With awareness, forgive yourself and others for any wrongdoings, real or perceived.  In the big picture of life and death, does any resentment you are holding on to really matter?"

So we alcoholics do not have the market cornered on the resentment front.

God and Working on Myself . . . Finally . . . For Once in my Life

I don't know what to call stuff like this: coincidence or serendipity or a God shot.  Whatever.  I love it when it happens.  I wrote my GAD post, picked up my Toltec meditation book, and read this: "Your emotions - regardless of the triggers - are expression of yourself.  Uncomfortable emotions let you know there is a problem to attend to, a wound for you to work on, thus allowing you to see your  own truth.  With awareness, you can observe your uncomfortable emotions, as they may be showing you a belief that you are holding which is no longer true for you."   

Today I am presented with this nugget from the "Into Action" section of the Plain Language Big Book: "Many alcoholics lead double lives.  We are like actors.  When we are around other people, we act like a character on stage, showing them the version of ourselves we want them to see.  We pretend to be people we are not so others will like us.  Psychologists tend to agree that alcoholics struggle to be honest with themselves, and also struggle to be honest with others."

I spent my entire adult life trying to fit in, to be liked by everyone, even people I didn't like or respect.  People-pleasing to the Nth degree.  So it should have come as no surprise that I didn't have a very good idea who I was.  I was shape-shifting to make myself palatable.  Today . . . not so much.  I don't think that it's very hard to get to know me.  I don't think it's very hard to figure out how I act when I'm not in a meeting.  I do enjoy being popular and liked but I don't lose any sleep over it when I'm not

Me and Dr. Bob

Our Founders, Bill W and Dr. Bob.  I always wanted to be a Dr. Bob - kind, humble, thoughtful, spiritual - but I'm clearly a Bill W.  I'm on the move, trying to get people to do what I think is best and to recognize my brilliance in all things human, selling, promoting, always selling.  Sigh.  I AM working on it.  Dr. Bob was once asked why he still attended meetings.  Here's what he said: 

1,  Sense of duty.

2.  It is a pleasure.

3.  Because in so doing I am paying my debt to the man who took time to pass it on to me.

4.  Because every time I do it I take out a little more insurance for myself against a possible slip.

I was pondering in my Quiet Time this morning why I still attend meetings regularly after 38 years.  My list - which I'm typing down before looking up Bob's list so it's going to be interesting/revealing to me to see the convergence and the divergence:

1.  I don't think about drinking or using except on rare occasions but occasionally some stray thought will pop into my head, wondering about the greatly increased THC concentration in today's weed or how hard lemonade or a craft beer would taste.  Very rare but not unheard of.  I need to always remain vigilant.

2.  I owe a debt to the men and women who listened to my insufferable younger self whine and complain about everything.  I was being treated so unfairly by the world and here's why!  That kind of crap.  Thanks to all of you, living or dead.

3. I try to repay this debt in some little form by helping new people begin the trudging process.  God help us all but I do have some experience, strength, and hope to pass along.  This was the genesis of my still shocked realization that giving with no expectation of return is one of life's great joys.  That still makes no sense to me, how satisfying that is, so I try not to think about it too much.  Even writing it down just now gives me the heebie-jeebies.

4.  I gotta say this - alcoholics are very interesting people once they stop acting like out of control psychopaths.  Not just psychopathic behavior - out of control nuttiness.  We're smart and talented and hard-working, curious people with a lot of charm and charisma and we learn how to present this to the world without being insufferable narcissists.  I like hanging around with people in recovery.  It's not often boring.

GAD

 Generalized Anxiety Disorder:  Chronic, exaggerated worry about everyday issues.

Causes and Factors: "While the exact cause is unknown, they likely stem from a mix of genetics, environmental stress, and brain chemistry.  Factors include family history, traumatic experiences, and chronic illness."

I have GAD written down on my medical chart.  I have been diagnosed with this and it is a real thing and not something I've just made up like almost everything else in my life.  When I try to explain to non-GAD people what it means, exactly, I say: "I used to be nervous about everything and anything, and I still have a tendency to trend into disaster."  There's nothing logical about it.  I have been able to manage it via a combination of therapy, light medication, and thousands of hours of exercise and meditation.  It's still fire but it's in the fireplace most of the time.

Anxiety:  (From the American Psychological Association)  An emotion characterized by apprehension and somatic symptoms of tension in which an individual anticipates impending disaster, catastrophe, or misfortune.

Disaster!  Catastrophe!!  My car is in the repair shop!  It will never be the same and it will become a lemon and I'm fucked!

Wait, wait . . . my car is in an accredited repair shop full of highly trained, professional mechanics who deal with damage far, far worse than this and they are working on non-mechanical, purely cosmetic damage and everything is going to be just fine.

Pick one of those and tell me which is more pleasant.

I try to remember that anxiety is a normal, omnipresent human emotion that prepares us for the unknown.  We all have it.  We're all going to have it forever and ever and ever.  I will eternally remember the psychologist who looked at me and said: "What is the anxiety trying to tell you?  What is the message?"  I was so busy trying to avoid it or change it into something pleasant or bury it under a soporific that I never learned the skills to manage it.  Quit trying to run away!  Look for the lesson and learn something for once in your stupid life!

Let's say for example that I'm not getting any hot water in my house.  I go outside and see that there's water leaking out of the heater.  I do not touch the heater because it has hot, scalding, pressurized water in it and there is no good outcome on God's green earth that can come from me having anything whatever to do with the appliance.  I don't even like looking at it.  It could explode, dousing me with scalding water and don't tell me this is unlikely because I have a mole on the inside feeding me confidential information.  So I called an HVAC guy and set up an appointment.  I have the money to fix or even replace the entire thing.  Not having anything but warm water for a few hours is not the end of the world.  Yet . . .  I feel some anxiety.  This is NORMAL anxiety.  I'm okay with this anxiety.  My problem is that if I'm not vigilant I can find myself drifting into the milieu of impending disaster.  There is no impending disaster!  Go take a walk, you idiot, and all will be well! 

More Aspects of Weirdo Humanity

 In my Quiet Time I ask for help from outside my self in directing my thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest, or self-seeking motives.  I'm not positive what that means exactly, or how it applies to me.  Certainly, I'm self-seeking.  THAT one I get.  I'm a self-seeking guided missile.  A self-seeking bulldozer.  I don't think I'm all that dishonest; at least that I know of.  Sure, I lie all the time but is that what the Big Book is really talking about?  Some lying to make myself look better in the eyes of my fellows or to hide up some shitty, underhanded behavior  that might make me look better seems perfectly reasonable to me.  Everybody does that, right?  But the suggestion that makes me pause is the reminder to avoid self-pity whenever possible.  I really, seriously don't think that I fall into that trap too often.

So here's some stuff . . .  

I called a friend in The Program and didn't get a return call.

I sent a long, clever, relatable text to a new person in The Fellowship with whom I have a strong relationship.  Crickets.

I sent a note out to a friend about a topic that I really thought about and heard an entire chorus of different crickets.

The car repair is taking longer than I had hoped.  Not longer that I expected but longer than I had hoped.

None of this stuff is important.  None of this stuff is out of the ordinary.  But it has sort of bugged  me, you know?  The sane part of my brain is saying: "Chill out." and the insane part, the huge, massive insane part, is shrieking: "The world is ending!!"

Humans Are Weirdos

Being a human can be such a weird experience.  Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it veers off into the illogical.  I guess that's why it's so much fun and simultaneously so annoying.  I have a few things to take care of in the next ten days, some of it routine - like exercise and meetings - and some of it unique - SuperK needs a ride to a medical appointment, a play is on the books, picking up our damaged car - but nothing out of the ordinary and certainly nothing alarming or overly stressful but I woke up this morning with all of this stuff all jumbled up in my head - how to configure my schedule to make it work to my liking.  If I swim this day then I can go to the meeting that day but if I wait a day then my swim day will fall on the dentist day . . . you get it - useless, frustrating, circular thinking.  Whatever happens, however things shake out, it's not even remotely important in the long run.  I sat on the edge of the bed in my jam-jams for the longest time juggling the different options in my head.  That was only frustrating so I pulled out my paper calendar and tried to make sense of the options looking at something more carnal than brain waves.  That was also fucking useless so I grabbed my journal and made a series of flow charts trying to sort out the options.  I felt like an insane person.  Not scary, permanently insane but definitely having some type of dissociative mental break.  It looked like I was putting together an engineering chart to set up a nuclear reactor.  There was a tiny voice in my frontal cortex - the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and other highly developed functions - chirping that this was a waste of my time but the animal, prehistoric, automatic part of my brain was in full control.  My brain was engaged doing something that T. Rex was capable of doing.

Yeah, I am not allowed to pilot a motor vehicle today.

And why, today, did my brain veer off into these tangents?  The great mystery of life.

A Vision For Me

One of the passages that is often read at the conclusion is called A Vision For You.  This passage is found in The Big Book during a primer on how to do the Fourth Step which would indicate that good stuff starts to happen very early in the process.  Here's the version found in the Plain Language Big Book: "All sorts of amazing things began to happen for us.  We felt a new sense of purpose.  Everything we needed came to us, so long as we continued to trust in our Higher Power.  We became less interested in ourselves.  We stopped worrying about our little plans and schemes.  Instead, we were interested in seeing how we could contribute to life and how we could help other people.  We felt a new kind of power flow in.  We enjoyed peace of mind, and we discovered we could face life successfully.  As we became aware of God's presence in our lives, we stopped feeling afraid of both the present and the future.  We felt like we had been reborn."

I like the implication that if I quit trying so hard to run the world that I begin to know how to behave, whether to act or to wait patiently, and that this ability just begins to manifest itself.  It isn't something that I have to strain for, pushing and pulling until I'm red in the face.  I find myself thinking: "Oh.  This is what I have to do."  or "Oh.  I don't know what the fuck I'm supposed to do about this or that right now so maybe I should take a shower and not worry about it" certain in the knowledge that I'll find the answer eventually.

I like the implication that I'm going to STOP THINKING ABOUT MYSELF ALL OF THE TIME!  I used to think about myself all the time; then I started forcing myself to think about other people, gritting my teeth and resentful as hell but doing it anywhere, mostly to escape the wrath of my sponsor; and now I find myself genuinely, truly, naturally thinking about others, no shit, I'm not making this up.  Not all the time but it now comes a lot more naturally.

I like the implication that peace of mind is not some bullshit concept felt in some bullshit text somewhere, that I can look forward to a life where I'm not regretting what I've done or fearing what is going to come next.  And that I have a real purpose in life, that I'm not simply a useless eater taking up valuable space on the planet.