Squat

One of our more complicated Keep It Complicated members is a bit of a doozy.  He has been erratic and unpredictable which doesn't exclude him from our membership, that's for sure.   I think I heard that he had been in a bad car accident but that's unconfirmed.  He might have been a heavy drug user - some of the stuff making the rounds out there right now is scary stuff - or he might just have some kind of emotional or mental deficiency.  For a while when he shared every third word out of his mouth was effing this and effing that and was more storytelling than recoverytelling.  I myself have been known to drop an F-Bomb - even in a meeting - but when it's overused it can get tedious and I have to keep in mind that it's going to be offensive to some people.  He was called out about this at a meeting a while back and he reacted in a dramatic way - slamming out of the room in a hurricane of obscenity.  We didn't see him for a while but now he's showing up again.  He seems a lot calmer, a lot better.  I make it a point to always say hello to him but other than that I've been keeping my distance.  Dealing with someone like that is best left to our younger, beefier members.

Our Saturday meeting is larger than on any given weekday.  During the secretary's announcements before we pray out the woman who has that commitment on Saturday made a point of thanking this man for showing up early and setting up the room, no tiny task for a group that averages close to 60 people.  He got a round of applause and it was evident this attention really pleased him.  Then, as happens in our Fellowship, he won the raffle for a year's subscription to the Grapevine, our meeting in print.  For the gambling addicts among us that's a one in thirty-six chance.  The room erupted with applause and hoots and hollers.  Now our boy had a big smile on his face.  He's the kind of person that's vaguely off-putting so I wonder/worry about the effects of loneliness and isolation in his life.  Who knows?  Maybe he's got a big family and a wide circle of friends?  Still, I was glad to see the inclusiveness of Keep It Complicated.  Sometimes the meeting gets under my skin for being too gentle and accommodating, and then I see the effects on someone who needs to be handled with gentleness and accomodation.  

You know what I know?  Squat.  Squat is what I know.

At Peace, At Rest

"Rest is not a matter of doing absolutely nothing.  Rest is repair."                                                             Daniel Josslyn

I try to listen to my body.  It sends me subtle messages then not so subtle messages and then it screams loudly that I need to slow down, to rest.  I don't think resting necessarily means doing nothing.  It can be slowing down my pace, becoming less active, less tense and intense, saying "enough is enough."  I read an essay from an introvert who struggled to explain to her extroverted husband why she needed bursts of solitude and quiet: "When you see me sitting, looking out at the lake?  I'm doing something.  I know it looks like nothing but that's not the case."  Quietly recharging the mental and emotional batteries.

The Plain Language Big Book includes this phrase in its description of Tradition Twelve: "It reminds us that A.A.'s principles should guide us, not what individual members say, do, think, or believe."  Love it.  I always struggled when I heard "principles before personalities."

This Is The End, My Friend, The End

The father of my dear sincity friend, Spandex, succumbed to the inevitability a few days ago, a father with whom he was close.  Spandex is about twenty years younger than me so I can share my very real recollections of how the loss of both of my parents and my A.A. sponsor of twenty-five years - more of a everyday dad than my real father - affected me.  If a parent lives to a reasonably ripe old age the loss brings into sharp reflection that there really is an end game here.  People are going to get older and get sicker and then die.  We can speculate all we want about What Comes Next but there are no known examples of anyone cheating The End here on earth.  Death is a very real, very defined thing.  The person is gone and that, my friends, is that.  I try my best to live a good life and to treat people well because at some point there's not going to be a chance to correct wrongs, to make things right.  Some regret is going to be inevitable but let's all try to keep our side of the street squeaky clean.  Let's avoid those "I shoulda done this" and those "I shouldna done that" to a dull roar, to an absolute minimum.

I was at the endodontist yesterday to have a root canal redone - should I call that a re-root? - and this was the second root canal that had to be redone.  The endodontist shrugged when we were talking about why this was happening.  Sometimes stuff doesn't work out.  Sometimes people get cancer.  Sometimes people abuse their teeth for their whole lives and suffer no adverse consequences and sometimes people (Me!  That people!) floss and brush and water-pik and get regular check-ups and my teeth shrug - meh - and fall apart.  And I'm aware that at my age the ability of my body to repair itself gets more and more tenuous.  All I can do is to take good action and - when things don't work out the way I want them to - sit quietly with the results and learn whatever lesson is there for me to learn.  The doctor and I yesterday briefly talked about the misery that almost always occured to the few people who made it to my age who 100 years ago.  No novocaine.  No implants.  Crappy antibiotics.  No pain killers if a tooth needed to be extracted.  I'm assuming most older people were walking around with half of their teeth gone, gumming their gruel in the morning.  My jaw was damn sore last night - so what?

Thanks to Jim Morrison and The Doors for today's title.

Om Mani Padme Hum

Meditation Tone Number One:

Om Mani Padme Hum

An ancient Sanskrit mantra that translates as "The Jewel is in the Lotus."

Meditation Tone Number Two:

Om Shanti Ananda

Another ancient Sanskrit mantra "Om, Peace, Bliss."

Sanskrit is an Indo language that is four thousand years old and serves as the primary sacred language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Om is a sound described in Hindu scriptures as being the primordial sound of creation.

I like Tone Number 2 better.  I'm not sure how the realization that the jewel is in the lotus makes me calmer and more present.  It is a little longer and more pleasant to the ear.  Too many clanging, hard "n" sounds in Number 2 which harshes my buzz somewhat.

There's a bit in a Simpson's episode where the hypocritical minister Lovejoy is glossing over the details of Apu's Hindu faith.  Apu says: "I'm Hindu!  There are a billion of us!"  The Reverand says: "That's super."

"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do."

Willa Cather

I can learn to be more accepting of my surroundings, the circumstances of my life.  I can learn to grow no matter how difficult it may seem.  Such growth can enrich my life and make me stronger so I don't break with the weight of problems or difficulties.  The trees are fixed in place so if the soil is crappy and rocky or there's a lack of moisture they have to deal with it.  They can't go someplace else where things are better.  I continue to marvel at the fact that in a healthy forest all the different species strive to thrive and prosper but they're also helping and being helped by the other beings around them.  They talk to each other if there's an insect infestation.  They dump their nutrients into the soil when they sense there time is up.  Oak trees aren't considered ancient until they reach four hundred years.  And they're not the oldest tree species by a long shot.  Maybe we should pay more attention to the trees?

Love, Love Me Do

"Intead of simply experiencing love, being love, our narrators explain how love should feel: what makes us worthy of love; who should love us and how they should express it; what we need to do or achieve to love ourselves, and what others need to do to receive our love in return."

 

Seek to love rather than be loved.     

"When we begin to believe society's analysis of what love should be and we become attached to that belief, we begin to impose it on ourselves and others, thus creating a distorted reflection of love.  What has really happened is that we have just made love conditional."

Love people for who they are and not who you want them to be.

Sometimes I see people at meetings looking at their phone.  That's there business, I guess.  I don't do it and they're not asking me if it's a good idea if they should do it so my example is all I can offer.  I read about the results of a study done that tried to quantify how effective multi-tasking is.  The technique was to ask the subject to read while simultaneously listening to someone speak through head phones, and then to test them to see how well they absorbed both sources of information.  Unsurprisingly, they did a shitty job remembering the information coming from either source.

K.I.S.

"The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not."  

George Bernard Shaw

Look to the Elves

When I was newish I was occasionally asked to give a full Lead or talk in front of a group.  The talk is an opportunity for you to share what it was like, what happened, and what it's like now.  Early on most of us have a whole shit-ton of "what it was like" and very little beyond that.  I had a run where I would talk about each of The Steps in order and what they meant to me.  While this can surely be a good way to approach the Lead - after all, we're getting sober in a Twelve Step Program - it also showed a little too much hubris on my part.  Like I was some kind of expert on working The Steps.  A guy in Chicago watched me floundering around, in and out, drunk and sober, and said: "I don't know what you think you're doing but it isn't working."  The first time I decided to exhibit some humility and do a Lead the way you're supposed to I started to get depressed as I listened to myself drone on and on, interminably, camped in the "what it was like" section way, way too long.  "Someone should put this son of a bitch out of his misery," I thought, while I was talking.  Ultimately, it was good for me to listen to myself go over my drinking history in such gruesome detail.  It dispelled any notion that I might not be an alcoholic or even that I was in the  category of High Bottom drunk.

A wise man once said: "The three most important things in life are: be kind, be kind, be kind."  Rat Boy is always rooting through the junk he has in his backyard and I'm hyper-sensitive to any noise he makes.  Sometimes I can't even hear what he's doing over the drone of an air conditioner or a leaf blower but I'm really transfixed by the suggestion of noise coming from him.  I don't think he's a bad dude.   I think he's a fuck-up.  He's living in his mother's old mobile home in a senior park and he doesn't appear to have a job.  While I'm being pretty kind and patient I can always go further.

Remember: everyone is always doing his or her best.

Remember: everyone is thinking about themselves.  No one is thinking about you.  No one is doing anything to you.  They are obliviously crashing along through life with the tools they've been given.  Just like you.  My drunken actions weren't directed at anyone.  I was just drinking and ignoring collateral damage.

Because I believe in the concept of synchronicity I am not amazed when concepts gather together and present themselves to me on any given day.  My other daily meditation book today had these thoughts: "The elves that came in the middle of the night to repair a child's broken toys knew without seeing the results that they were creating happiness and gratefulness in another.  We can do the same for others.  We can decide to be more caring, to watch for opportunities to reach out to others."  Those elves were pretty good dudes.  You could do worse than be an elf.

I'm in Dr. Bob's Story in the Plain Language Big Book.  A couple of sentences popped out as being germane to my life:  "From childhood through high school, my parents forced me to go to church."  Dude, I'm hearing that.  "My whole life was about doing what I wanted to do, without thinking about the rights or wishes of anyone else."  Dude, I am definitely hearing that.  I always liked the fact that Dr. Bob attended the University of Michigan to study pre-med and the professors got together to tell him that going forward they'd be just fine without his presence.  Boy, did that ever happen to me at Ohio  State University's College of Optometry.  I remember those last awful sessions with brutal clarity.  "Go away and don't come back," was the tone the dean used.