The Three Legacies

Legacy:  Something that is passed on; the long lasting impact of particular events, actions, etc. that took place in the past.

Do you know what the Three Legacies are?  I didn't, either.  Think about it and I'll reveal them at the end of the post.

Here's the D. Lama talking about the benefits of meditation and spiritual growth: "The real value of practice is seen when we face a difficult period.  When we are happy and everything goes smoothly, then practice seems not so urgent, but when we face unavoidable problems such as sickness, old, age, death, or other desperate situations, it becomes crucial to control our anger, to control our emotional feelings, and to use our good human minds to determine how to fact that problem with patience and calm."

I like how he emphasizes that we should properly use our "good minds" to transcend difficulties.

When someone is worrying unduly about unimportant things or about things that are unlikely to happen try this comment: "Are you telling yourself scary stories again?"

My morning meeting is listed as Open which means anyone is welcome.  Almost no one comes, of course, except for alcoholics or people who are alcoholics taking great pains to tell us why they're not alcoholics, although we get an occasional nursing student or Al-Anon member.  There's a woman from Al-Anon who has been attending regularly right now.  She has never shared - identifying only as a visitor - but has told me many times how much she's getting out of the meetings.  Good for her and she's most welcome.  I showed up late on Saturday - I spent some time unsuccessfully trying to unclog my toilet - and I was in the kitchen making tea while the introductory readings were going on when she drifted in, asked if she could talk to me for a minute, then spent some time effusively apologizing for her behavior towards me the previous day.  She had actually slept poorly worrying about it.  Once again, I was so pleased to be able to lean in and whisper: "I have no idea what you're talking about."  I really didn't.  She was relieved.  

Once again, no one is thinking about you.

Recovery.  Unity.  Service.  Three of 'em.  Count 'em.

Killing Time

At the beginning of the day it can feel like there's a lot of time ahead of me.  Then, at the end of the day, I haven't had enough time to do all the things that I wanted to do.  There I sit, ready to say goodbye to the day, unsatisfied at all the stuff I wanted to do but didn't do.  I'm amazed at my tendency to say things like "killing time" or "wasting time."  What does that mean, anyway?  From time to time SuperK and I will say: "Well, that's an hour of my time that I'll never get back" when reflecting on something that felt like  a waste.  Is any of my time useless?  Why don't I look at every minute as worthwhile and necessary?  Then I wouldn't feel so annoyed at what didn't get done.

This morning a friend of mine said this to me when I was giving her a pass for missing some meetings to spend time with her daughter who is visiting from Norway - Norway, for chrissake! - " I thought of you last night saying that you didn't get sober to sit in A.A. meetings."  It's a source of constant amazement to me that someone remembers any of the crap that I bring up in meetings.  Don't they have anything better to do with their time?

Saint Seaweed

More from the A.A. pamphlet on the idea of The Home Group:

Experience with alcohol is one thing all A.A. members have in common.  It is misleading to hint or give the impression that A.A. solves other problems or knows what to do about drug addiction.

Traditionally, most A.A. members through the years have found it important to belong to one group which they call their "Home Group."  This is the group where they accept service responsibilities and try to sustain friendships.  This Home Group, for many members, becomes their extended family.

The main difference between meetings and groups is that A.A. groups generally continue to exist outside the prescribed meeting hours, ready to provide Twelfth Step help when needed.

For me personally one of the hardest ideas to eject from my mind is the thought that everybody could benefit from a spiritual Twelve Step program.  Frankly, I don't know how people walk around all day without the kind of help I get in Alcoholics Anonymous.  I spend an inordinate amount of time working on my spiritual growth and still end up acting in ways that would make your average sociopath proud.

I know that having a regular group that I attend makes me accountable in ways that are important to my spiritual growth.  People see me and get to know me and notice when I'm not around.  I'm accountable.  I give a little extra money even though half the assholes there don't contribute.  I muck out coffee pots in the kitchen after the meeting even though I'm too important to do scut work.  I block the doorway after the meeting ends to make sure no one escapes without at least being acknowledged.  I can't tell you how aggravating it is to finish cleaning up in the kitchen where I'm secretly harboring resentments over the  cheapness of some of our members and then getting waylaid by a newcomer who's not that interesting and only marginally coherent while watching a friend flit out before I get a chance to talk to them.

I am a fucking Saint.

Seaweed: Murderer

My prescription for uncovering your character defects:      
1.  Hang around your family.

2.  Go to  work.

3.  For males - drive on a congested road with millions of other people who aren't perfect drivers like yourself.  I'll let the women speak for themselves.

I have a friend in my morning meeting who recently took a trip to Italy with members of her family.  The big problem that surfaced, of course, was that they didn't do things the right way which is to say: her way.  Of course not.  She came home in a bit of a funk and did some fuming while admitting she still had a pretty good time but feeling that she could have done better.  Of course she could have.  Knowing her pretty well I guessed that her behavior wasn't bad at all.  Then, after a pause, her kids started telling her that she should start planning another trip.  Confirmation that her behavior wasn't all that bad.

Here's my spiritual progression:

1.  Quit murdering people.  Instead tell them that you want to murder them.

2.  Quit telling them that you want to murder them.  Instead murder them in the privacy of your own mind.

3.  Quit murdering them in your mind.  Quit murdering them at all.  This is the really tough one.  There really are people out there I find offensive and reprehensible.

What's that we say in A.A.?  Actions; then words; then thoughts; and then peace of mind.

Inertia, Cognitive Dissonance, and Anxiety

Inertia:  A tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged.

"Past behavior is the best predicator of future behavior" is one of the greatest truths I've come across in a long time.  The New Year is approaching.  As a general rule I don't make New Year's resolutions, correctly believing that if you want to change something you should just change it today.  I bet the success rate of New Year's resolutions is under 10%.  If I want to change something then today's the day.

Dissonance:  Mental discomfort that comes from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes.

Another great truth in my life is that I'm enlarged when I make thinking about others my main priority.  This truth has the greatest cognitive dissonance for me.  It doesn't make sense intellectually that putting my own self-interest behind that of another is going to be helpful in the long run.

Anxiety: A mental condition caused by excessive apprehensiveness about real or perceived threats, typically leading to advoidance behaviors.

Then there's this truth: anxiety is part of my make-up.  Anxiety is never going to leave me.  Anxiety is a burden under which I've always had to labor and anxiety has been the great motivator in my life.  I'm vaguely worried that something crappy is going to happen so I take the steps to prevent the crap from actually happening.  Today, I'm pleased to report, the anxiety has receded into the background as sort of an mildly annoying distraction.  It's no longer a shrieking dissonance that demands my attention and distracts me from living a normal life.  When I'm tempted to worry I can almost hear a well-practiced mechanism inside my head click into action.  There's an electrical snapping noise and the sound of well-oiled gears starting up.  I find myself moving in a practiced way through the anxiety and into the solution.  So often I find the anxiety to be mostly bullshit, stuff that is unlikely to happen or stuff that's the naked result of me failing to take care of a matter that needs to be taken care of.

Let Me Tell You What You Should Do . . .

 I ran into a woman from my meeting while I was taking my beach walk yesterday.  She's pretty new with a daughter who is, I believe, struggling with her behavior.  She comes to the meeting, too, but I'm not sure what her sobriety status is.  I'm also not sure whether or not the mom has a sponsor or talks much to other women.  She bent my ear during the walk.  I think I was being helpful.  I'm so non-threatening that I wonder sometimes if I'm an asexual, kind of non-gender specific person for women.  That being said I'm glad I have women friends in my recovery.  SuperK will tell me anecdotes about her interactions with other women and it's clear that while men and women share a lot of similarities we really are different in some significant ways.  So it's helpful for me to hear a woman's point of view on different matters.  It makes me ponder circumstances in a way that I might not normally do.

Her daughter is engaging in sexual behavior that she dislikes.  Honestly, I don't find it objectionable at all.  Honestly, I think the mom is pretty religious and she's offended to see her offspring behaving in a way that violates the tenets of her faith.  Avoiding advice-giving like it's the bubonic plague I often point out that a parent's responsibility for an adult child's behavior is really pretty much past the expiration date.  Adult children get to do what they want.  And alcoholic adult children - the daughter, who I know less well, impresses me as being stubborn as hell - imagine that in an alcoholic - are not often receptive to hectoring about matters of morality from religious parents.  I don't know what it is about the tendency of some religious people to focus on bad behavior and not to praise good behavior.  I, personally, don't take well to criticism, justified or not.  Most of us are so hard on ourselves from the git-go that hearing about our faults makes us dig our spiked jackboots even deeper into the mud and muck.  You can show your children (or your alcoholic acquaintances) your vision of good behavior.  They can then decide if that's behavior they want to emulate.  And if the daughter is living with the mother then it's within her rights to lay down some ground rules if the daughter wants to continue living there.  I don't think mom is going to kick her child out so she can either button her lip or continue irritating the living shit out of the kid by haranguing her over and over about behavior that she's clearly going to continue doing.

How much time am I spending on my recovery today?  My spiritual and emotional growth?  A lot?  Some?  Not too damned much?  As much time as I spent feeding my addictions, for chrissake?  Tell me it's that much at least!

The To Do List and Grim Death

I'm sure I'm going to be repeating myself here.  This is to be expected.  How many new stories can I have?  How likely is it that I'm going to remember what stories I've told?  And how will I be able to reconstruct all of the lies that constitute the bulk of my best stories when I can't locate my wallet this morning?

There's a woman who attends my morning meeting who's a bit on the intense side if by "a bit" you mean "incredibly intense."  I always liked her because I like intense people but she was so intense that it made me uncomfortable in an amusing way.  Intense people get shit done and they accomplish a lot and they stretch themselves into new and interesting shapes.  I like that.  For a few years, however, I felt like whenever she approached me after a meeting I was being interviewed.  I was flattered but the conservations were impersonal and overwrought.  Her A.A. attendance was a perfect example of slotting in a healthy activity as a task to be completed.  Good for her for being diligent in her attendance but . . . c'mon . . . it's not supposed to be a grim task to be checked off the To List at the end of the day.  There should be some joy here.  We should come to meetings because we want to, not because we have to.  (Ed. Note: Nothing wrong with attending meetings because you know you should while not being particularly excited about it - this is common at the start and entirely understandable.  No one wakes up one morning and says: "Boy, my life is great - what the hell I think I'll go to Alcoholics Anonymous!")

My friend remarked one morning that the meetings made her feel so good and made such an improvement in her life outside The Rooms that she was going to start attending more frequently and not restrict herself to the two meetings a week she had slotted into her To Do list.  And I found that I began to enjoy her company more.  She's really pretty funny.  I would not have said this at the start.  She was wired like a time bomb.  Very accomplished but in a grim kind of way.

I never criticize anyone.  We're too hard on ourselves as it is.

I never . .  . ummm . . . try  to never . . . give advice.

Some Great Thoughts

Karma:  A concept of action, word, or deed and its effect or consequences; the good or bad emanations felt to be generated by someone.

Good, good, good . . . vibrations . . . . 

When you are confronted with trouble, do whatever you can to overcome it, but if it's insurmountable, then reflect on the fact that the trouble is due to your own actions in this life.  Understanding that suffering comes from karma will bring some peace as it reveals that life is not unjust.  Otherwise sorrow and pain might seem to be meaningless.  Life is fair, as a general rule.  Most of us get a lot of good stuff and an understandable amount of bad stuff.  I'm luck I don't get what I deserve or I'd be in some deep doo-doo.  Really, the concept of karma must be bullshit or I'd be dying a slow, horrible death as some loathsome blood-sucking parasite.

Initially a problem can seem solid and intractable until I investigate its true nature.  In the same way as I manage my contact with fire - which is by its nature hot and can sear my flesh and cook my food at the same time - I can learn how to work with suffering in my life.

I need to consider trouble from a broader perspective.  I need to learn how to reframe bad circumstances as forces assisting my spiritual development.

When I'm pissed at someone and wish that they suffer bodily, mental, and emotional harm or am overcome with jealousy over the advantages that someone else has (or I perceive they have) I should reflect on their attributes instead of obsessing on their shortcomings (or what I perceive as their shortcomings).

Thus spake the Dali Lama: "Many phenomena cannot be said to be inherently good or bad; they  are better or worse, only by comparison, not by way of their own nature.  Their value is relative.  From this you can see that there is a discrepancy between the way things appear and how they actually are."

Cookies and Such

I was milling around the kitchen this morning waiting for the tea kettle to heat up when a new woman walked in, looked around, and then admitted she was looking for something sweet, to no avail.  A few beats later she returned, following one of our older, sugar-obsessed members (not to my level, naturally, but still pretty impressively addicted) who directed her to the church refrigerator.  They pulled out a container that held some sketchy looking cookies of unknown provence or age, undoubtedly pawed over by countless grubby fingers, and each grabbed a few before happily heading off into the meeting room.

"Ah, my people,"  I thought.  I'm pretty sure that if someone had come in over the weekend and scattered stale cookies around the periphery of the room that Special Jeff and I would have spotted them immediately, brushed the ants and big pieces of dirt off before gobbling them down.  If all that weed I smoked in college didn't fry my brain a few ants aren't going to do much damage.

The leader this morning referenced this passage from the Big Book: "But when self-will had driven everybody away, and our isolation had become complete, it caused us to play the big-shot in cheap barrooms and then fare forth alone on the street to depend on the charity of passersby."  I like the phrase "fare forth" quite a bit.  Very Victorian.  Very strong memories of becoming increasingly isolated as my drinking progressed.

I must admit this fact: The Keep It Complicated group is a special group.  It has infuriated, frustrated, and annoyed me more over the years than all of the other meetings I've attended combined, but a more relaxed, amusing, tight-knit group you'll be hard pressed to find.  There were several of us long-timers who really stuck with it over the last couple of post-Covid years until the group built up a critical mass and has grown to a sustainable size.  While I was one of the guys that kept coming back I was also noted for the bitching and complaining and judging I did along the way.  

The Dali Lama: "From the time we are born to the time we die we suffer mental and physical pain, the suffering of change, and pervasive suffering of uncontrolled conditioning."

Of Buddhas and Hammers

Om Mani Padme Hum  - "On the path of life, with intention and wisdom, we can achieve the pure body, speech, and mind of a Buddha."

I wonder sometimes if I'm a Buddha?  Not THE Buddha, mind you, but maybe a lesser Buddha or a minor Buddha.  A bush-league Buddha.  Buddha-lite - half the wisdom of a full Buddha while still staying preachey.

Most of us are alone at some point during the day.  Time alone - with myself and my Higher Power - is an incredibly important part of my day.  In this stillness, I can listen to myself and feel my feelings without the constant distractions of the day.  When I'm still with myself I'm not running away from the silence.  It means feeling my feelings, whether they're good or bad.  It's a time for reflection and prayer.  Sometimes I just let my mind idle down, let it go wherever it wants to go while making a conscious effort to gently nudge it away from the negative and towards the positive.  This is a lot harder than it sounds.  I have to fight the urge to solve problems or uncover deficiencies.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the amount of things I believe I have to work on at one time.  When I feel overwhelmed I know this is my mind telling me I need to throttle back.  Honestly, I'm not sure I have a throttle so I'm guessing I'm going to have a hard time throttling it one way or the other.  I wonder if there's a throttle control of some kind?  There could be - you never know.  I'm like the dude who gets a headache from reading too much then decides to read a little more in case the headache goes away.  I'm like the guy who beats on his forehead with a hammer and then complains about the headache. 

Anonymity - The Hardest Word to Pronounce in the Fellowship

From an A.A. pamphlet on the group as a functioning entity:  "At the level of press, television, radio, film, and the Internet, anonymity stresses the equality in A.A. of all its members.  Most importantly, the Anonymity Tradition reminds us that it is the A.A. message, not the messenger, that counts.  At the personal level, Anonymity assures privacy for all members, a safeguard often of special significance to newcomers who may hesitate to seek help in A. A. if they have any reason to believe their alcoholism may be exposed publicly."    

Most of us who have been around for a while have had someone talk about our alcoholism inappropriately.  I've gotten too old and too retired and too I-don't-give-a-shit to hide my alcoholism on an individual basis anymore although I do insist before I'm interviewed for the Six O'clock News that my anonymity be honored publicly.  At least I will if this ever happens which it never will so I don't lose too much sleep over it.  I was on a bus at a company outing once when a co-worker - a drunk not in recovery who was, at the time, lit up - started asking me very loudly: "Seaweed!  Are you an alcoholic?" before launching into a long explanation about his drinking and the drinking in his family and why he had to drink etc etc etc. no doubt boring everyone on the bus but me as I was pretty terrified at being outed.

The second prong of the anonymity equation is that we are all equal as members in recovery.  No one gets to set the agenda or force someone to do something they don't want to do.  We're all at the same level of importance.  

Except for me.  I'm special.

Katherine Mansfield was a poet who wrote in the early 20th Century:  "Risk!  Risk anything!  Do the hardest thing on earth for you.  Act for yourself.  Face the truth." 

Socializing V Solitude

I need to achieve a balance between socializing and solitude.  If I'm around others day in and day out, I'll never learn what it feels like to be by myself.  Likewise, if I'm isolated a lot, I'll never learn what it's like to be around others.  I'll be like a feral cat - I'll stay away from someone who has some cat food.  I won't get hurt but I'll stay hungry.  My recovery depends on a sound balance between the two.  

Fucking balance . . .  I'm tired of hearing about balance.  Whose great idea was balance, anyway?  I'm much more interested in probling the scary outer limits of everything.  Balance.  Grrrr . . . .  

My old buddy the Dalai Lama wants to chime in this morning on the topic of meditation:  "Do not let your mind think on what has happened in the past, nor let it chase after things that might happen in the future; rather, leave the mind vivid, without any constructions, just as it is.  If a thought comes, just look into its very nature, and the concept will lose its power and dissolve of its own accord.  Sometimes, with exertion, you can prevent a thought from fully forming.  More likely, though, thoughts will dissolve as they form, and even when they do come, they will not be powerful."

The other thing that irritates me about this recovery thing is that the instructions we're given seem to be ephemeral.  They twist in the wind, they come and go, you do this, sort of, then maybe you try that, and don't bitch because it's the exact opposite of what you've heard before.  When you meditate, as I understand the process, you aren't trying to control your thoughts, just watch them come and go.  But then the word "exertion" comes into play.  So what is it I'm doing?  Exerting myself?  Or just watching shit float in and out?  Dammit!

A New State of Consciousness and Being

From The 12 & 12:  "Maybe there are as many definitions of spiritual awakening as there are people who have had them.  But certainly each genuine one has something in common with all the others .  . . When a man or a woman has a spiritual awakening, the most important meaning of it is that he has now become able to do, feel, and believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone.  He has been granted a gift which amounts to a new state of consciousness and being.  He has been set on a path which tells him he is really going somewhere, that life is not a dead end, not something  to be endured or mastered.  In a very real sense he has been transformed, because he has laid hold of a source of strength which, in one way or another, he had hitherto denied himself."

"A new state of consciousness and being.  Whew."  Not bad.  Who wouldn't want that?  I like the implication that we will see a commonality with others, that this fact will allow us to tap into strength and resources that we couldn't access before.  And that we'll no longer look at life as a long slog through misery unless we can exert our will and bend it to our liking.  Both sound like a recipe for misery to me.

But then in 1955, Bill W wrote this: "There are those who predict that A.A. may well become a new spearhead for a spiritual awakening throughout the world.  When our friends say these things, they are both generous and sincere.  But we of A.A. must reflect that such a tribute and such a prophecy could well prove to be a heady drink for most of us - that is, if we really came to believe this to be the real purpose of A.A., and if we commenced to behave accordingly."

Also whew.  I used to promote Alcoholics Anonymous as THE solution to alcoholism.  Oh, callow youth!  I no longer do this.  I'm appreciative of anyone who comes into The Rooms and gives us a look.  I often say that, for the alcoholic, we have A solution to the problem of alcoholism.  It's not for every one.  If you don't like it or you think you can do better elsewhere I say: "Good for you.  Godspeed.  No hard feelings on our part and good luck to you."  But isn't this typical of our kind?  We've found something that works for us - finally found something - and now we're going to ram it down the throats of everyone within spitting distance.  This is my newish attitude about sponsorship, too.  I can help you?  Great.  I can't help you.  Great.  Go find someone who can.

Don't Fall Off a Cliff Today

"We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong.  The amount of work is the same."  Carlos Castaneda 

I cannot yell at anyone in recovery any more.  We're not stupid - we know what we're doing, at least in a vague and peripheral way.  If I tell someone who is smoking meth that it's probably not a good idea no one is going to say: "Really!  Wow, I never thought of that!  Thanks for pointing that out!"  This week a woman asked me to give her daughter - who is struggling to stay sober - a hard time, shake her up, yell at her.  "Sorry," I said.  "Not my style."  I just can't do it anymore.  Not that I ever did it much, but the people I find myself drawn to in The Rooms are generally so hard on themselves that I can't bring myself to heap on more.  Most of us know what we're doing - we just don't want to make the changes yet.  The tragedy is that it ends up being too late for some of us.

I look at my Higher Power the same way.  I'm sure there's positive stuff in the religious tomes and tracts that I was subjected to in my youth but it was the dire warnings that stuck in my mind.  I'm a negative guy who is drawn to the problem or the shortcoming in everything.  For chrissake my job was to try to find or anticipate problems in machinery.  Why would I think this wouldn't translate to my personal life?  And to repeat myself: humans who spent energy anticipating trouble survived and passed this worry-anxiety gene to their progeny.  Happy go lucky ones fell off cliffs.

Talk is cheap.  Show me - don't tell me.

The Dude Will Abide

Excitement prevents stability.                                                                                                                        Lethargy causes laxity.

The goal is calm abiding.

The dude will abide.

When your mind is too intense, and you experience excitement, you need to loosen it, like loosening the strings of a guitar a bit.  Similarly, when you have laxity, your mind is not intense enough, so you need to increase its intensity by making it a little more taut, like tightening the strings.  My mind is like a fine stringed instrument, one that Peter Townshend has bashed into a bank of Marshall amplifiers repeatedly or that Jimi Hendrix has set on fire.

"The force behind developing concentrated meditation is mindfulness, which is the ability to stay with an object, not allowing distraction.  You exercise mindfulness by putting your mind back on its object of meditation every time it falters, which will happen time and time again."

Here are the three greatest gifts that Alcoholics Anonymous has provided me:

1.  A working God, a kind God, a positive God, a non-threatening God who talks a lot about heaven and never mentions hell.

2.  A community of people who have made my life a complete joy.

3.  And three is the tricky, irritating one: the imperitive to ruthlessly, relentlessly analyze my inner workings so I can find out what's wrong with me and quit trying to find what fault with other people, places, and things.

It's not them - it's you.

Angry Chris

 Here's another Angry Chris anecdote . . . 

I state repeatedly that talk is great but talk is also cheap and behavior, action, is where the rubber meets the road.  I have heard far too many people speak platitudes with their lying mouths and then behave in ways that I find objectionable.  Don't tell me - show me.  Anyway, Chris would share driving stories early on.  I don't know what it is about guys but driving is one huge trigger.  Why we think other drivers are out to torment us personally is beyond my understanding but we seem to think that someone stranger in a car has it out for us personally.  For a while he would get so pissed that he would turn around and follow someone whose driving offended him.  Then that stopped.  The stories shifted to where there was a lot of horn-honking and curse-hurling and bird-flashing and first waving, but he no longer chased the offending party.  There was radio silence for a while until he shared the story of driving through a neighborhood on Halloween night with his girlfriend and her kids and being admonished by a parent for driving too fast.  He gritted his teeth, admitted his infraction, and then drove off slowly, muttering death threats and curses and imprecations at this person.  I loved it.  Bad action gives way to bad speech gives way to bad thinking.  Bad thinking is something I still have to work on - I'm much better at it, no longer damning people to an eternity on a lake of fire - but, boy, it's a far sight better than  

Angry Chris

The guy that chaired our meeting yesterday was a regular for a number of years before moving on to other groups.  He has about seven years of sobriety and there were a surprising number of members in attendance with about the same amount.  I love listening to people who have made it to that five to seven year window.  I believe we lose sight of a lot of people then - not necessarily to drinking but often just to complacency and ennui - but the ones that stay seem to a member to pass through into a greater realm where I perceive a real deep sense of calmness and spiritual comfort instead of looking at recovery as a necessary track.  It's so remarkable that I can see the peace reflected in their faces.

His informal nickname early on was Angry Chris because the dude was  . . . well . . . pretty angry.  I found out soon after that he didn't really like hugs so I made sure to hug him at least twice in each meeting and if I was chairing I announced that Chris really liked hugs.  It was like hugging a board.  Dude didn't move.  He was not relaxed during the hugs.  Then, a while later, I told him that I loved him.  The expression on his face!  Like I passed gas that was so offensive as to be almost lethal.  Then guess what I did?  Went out of my way to express my affection when I saw him and when he was leaving.  That's my specialty - finding a sore spot and probing it over and over.  Yesterday he hugged me first and he told me he loved me.  

Great, wondrous shit, man.  Unbelievable shit.

California Dreamin'

Balance:  A condition in which different elements are in correct proportions; having the right amount - not too much or too little - of any quality, which leads to harmony or evenness.

Many times our recovery will seem like it's proceeding at a snail's pace.  Our potential for growth is a result of effort we put into it and the time we give it.  The steady regulation of time forces growth to be gradual and balanced.  For growth to be good, it must stand the test of time.

I often walk after the Saturday meeting with a younger guy - a good dude, a dude I respect, a dude with a big Program - who is not a sponsee but I think he looks to me as a mentor or minor league, fill-in sponsor or a voice of wisdom or reason or as someone who is so stupid that I won't be able to see how awful his behavior  is.  We sometimes talk about women in recovery.  And men in recovery who are interested in women in recovery.  And how sometimes - not often but it's not unheard of - the occasional bad actor will take advantage of a woman who may be hurting or lonely or confused.  And I'm not going to suggest this is a one way street - there are plenty of wack-o females in The Rooms as well who mislead and toy with men - but men are conditioned socially to pursue women they find attractive.  As SuperK says: "I'm married - I'm not dead."

Anyway, my friend has commented on the charms of this young woman who has been with us for about five months.  She looks like a poster child for California and has a very sweet, kind personality.  A few weeks back I saw him speaking to her after the meeting - this woman and her cute sponsor - and I gave him a little shit about it in a good natured way.  Then today, after the meeting ended and I was talking to some friends, I saw him approach her again and they appeared to exchange phone numbers.  As he was walking out I sauntered over and turned both of my hands palms-up as if to say: "What the fuck?"  I was smiling.  Kinda.  He said jokingly: "I don't want to talk about it" and walked outside.

A bit later I passed him on my beach walk and he stopped me: "I've been running down here wondering how I can explain my behavior to you and I decided I'd just lie."  He was laughing but still . . . it wasn't all that funny, if you think about it.  "I'm smitten," he said.  I get it.  This girl is cute and he's been married a long time and he's been sober about seven years which is when we start to think "Really?  This is all there is?" and I think she's a pretty trusting individual, especially in A.A. where a number of us older guys have treated her with a lot of consideration and respect so far.  It's okay to be attracted to forbidden fruit and to fantasize occasionally about things we want but can't have.  We need to overcome these urges.  This is how we grow.

Be interesting to see how my buddy behaves.  He seemed contrite, abashed, embarrassed.  I hope so.  I don't hang with guys who are two-timing their significant others. 

Lonely in Our Isolation

Lonely:  Alone; solitary; a standing apart of others from your kind; sad because one has no friends or company.

Isolation: The condition of being alone, especially when this makes one feel unhappy (stresses detachment from others, often involuntarily).

From an Alcoholics Anonymous pamplet entitled "Many Paths To Spirituality" . . . . 

"Alcoholism can be a lonely affair.  Often, we drank to keep the pain of life at arm's length, and then, when the pain overran us, we drank to wash it away.  Our families, friends, employers and even complete strangers began to pull away from us, wary of our denials and skeptical of our many lies and pledges to stay sober."

Boy, do I know a lot about those "pledges" to stay sober.  What I was pledging was to keep lying as long as I could get away with it.  I'd say whatever you wanted me to stay if you would just get off my back.  "Denials" are also quite familiar to me.  Saying that you didn't do something even though it was completely transparent that you did that exact thing.

I was musing idly in my aimless retirement about that informal saying "Bring the body and the mind will follow."  I was directed in my journey to first act well, then speak well, then think well . . .or at least try to think well.  I'm awfully secure in my speech and my actions today while freely admitting that my thoughts occasionally veer into the uncharitable and sometimes get quite close to the murderous.  I give my self a break on this.  I can kill you in my mind as long as I don't actually kill you or even tell you that I'm going to kill you.  But we do get better physically, then mentally, and finally, spiritually.  It's that last one that has the occasional trip wire.

Boom!