Over the years I have maintained a constant, on-going dialogue with Herr Luber, a friend of long duration who knows me uncomfortably well and one of the few non-alcoholics who reads what I write (swelling my fan base by 50%, no doubt). We usually lapse into somewhat pompous reveries about death, the meaning of life, and how almost every human emotion or achievement can be reduced to and adequately explained by a sports analogy, usually involving a football player from the 1960s, like Lou "The Toe" Groza or Big Daddy Lipscomb, before he OD'ed on heroin.
Again I say that a lot of the things that alcoholics experience can be found in our fellow Earth People. The difference is that they don't need to drink when they feel frustrated or want to celebrate or are bored or uncomfortable, or just for the hell of it. It doesn't relieve anything for them or, if it does, temporarily, they can see that it's no long term solution and that it's causing more problems than it's solving.
Herr Luber and I are both Strivers. We both have an impossibly long list of things that we want to accomplish. Some of the things on our lists are never going to pan out for us, and some of them take a lot of time and effort. I personally don't like to consider the fact that I may be spending a lot of time on something that may never work out the way I want it to (by "the way I want it to" I mean "bringing me great fame and fortune.") Whenever I slow down for a few minutes an impossibly powerful part of my brain starts to squirm and talk to me, urging me to get busy, get to work, be productive.
This isn't all bad. I get a lot done. And I see this in many, many alcoholics. We're workers. Sure, we pretend like we're lazy but we're really not. I don't know many alcoholics who aren't very productive. I think we like to beat ourselves up by pretending that we are lazy.
I was wrestling with my Quiet Time this morning and thinking about how sitting in a chair with a cup of coffee, pondering a work day and getting some exercise and all the other stuff I can or have to do today, differs from sitting in a chair with a cup of coffee, watching the sun rise over the Caribbean, with nothing specific on my agenda. After a good vacation I wonder if I could simply spend the rest of my life drinking coffee, eating a bowl of papaya and pineapple -- good pineapple, fresh, just picked, not that hard crap you buy at Kroger's -- and letting life wash over me like a gentle tropical breeze.
Probably. I'm sure like to be in a position to give it a shot for a couple of years. But in reality I'm sure I would get bored after a while. The goal is melding accomplishments with peace of mind. I don't want to spend every waking minute running willy-nilly to the next task. But I do want to feel productive.
Quiet a parlor trick, when you think about it.
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