An Evil and Corroding Thread

I'm really riding the Toltec gravy train . . .  

"Fear of failure: What am I afraid of?  Where does this fear come from?  Am I willing to let fear keep me from pursuing my passion?  Focusing on all the steps it may take to achieve your final goal can have the effect of fanning the flames of fear.  Instead, just take one small step forward in the direction of your passion."

It is so fascinating to me as a True Believer of the Program of Alcoholics Anonymous, as someone who had as unmanageable a life as it's possible to have, to see what are essentially, more or less, the spiritual principles that serve as the bedrock of our lives, spoken so clearly by a people who lived in the jungles of Central America ten centuries ago.  Fear!  Attacking my problems one small bite at a time . . . or One Day at a Time.  Unbelievable how universal spirituality is.

"Practicing awareness takes discipline, a strengthening of our will that allows us to remain in a state of harmony with the world around us."

Or, in A.A. speak, ". . . and to practice these principles in all our affairs."

Practice:  To perform or work at repeatedly so as to become proficient; exercising a skill regularly  in order to be able to do it better.

I'm also struck by how often the concept of "work" appears.  Working the Steps; Working with Others; How it Works; Into Action.  It goes on and on.

What IS the Point?

"I don't think happiness or unhappiness is the point.  How do we best learn from them and transmit what we have learned to others, if they would receive the knowledge?  When pain comes, we are expected to learn from it willingly, and help others to learn.  When happiness comes, we accept it as a gift, and thank  God for it."

As Bill Sees It.

I have come to really embrace this idea that looking for "happiness" is a dicey proposition.  Too often I'm looking to get what I want - or what I want to avoid - and then I'll be happy.  This ties how I feel to external events or forces.  I have learned to embrace the word "content."  This ties how I feel to my internal state.  I laughed when I read the line that this search for happiness isn't "the point."  The point is, as I understand it, to look at whatever is going on with wisdom and perspective, certain that the pain will eventually end and striving to learn from it so that I can pass my experience on to others and so that I don't live my life afraid of future pain . . . which will certainly come for me.

Surrender

A guy with about a year of sobriety led the meeting this morning.  I thought he did a good job although I wasn't able to discern a specific topic.  When other members started to share they talked about the amends process.  I have no idea why.  I heard absolutely nothing about making amends during the leader's share.  Probably, I wasn't listening closely, but I will say that one of the things that happens to me when I lead a meeting is that people pick up on some obscure point that pales in comparison to what I intended to be the main thrust of my talk and off they go, sharing about whatever they want to share about.

I'm going to be traveling in a foreign country and won't have access to live meetings.  I'll be okay.  I'll miss these idiots and knuckleheads, I'll tell you that.

Since I should be prohibited by law from drinking anything that contains caffeine I usually have a cup of herbal tea at the meeting.  I picked Ginger Infusion or Peach Surprise or some such shit for my selection today.  I ripped off the top of the packet which didn't quite expose the tea bag.  The packet was made of some kind of plastic-ey material so I couldn't get down far enough to grab the tea bag and my efforts to tear it along one of the side edges failed, too.  I handed the packet to a woman I know.  She was useless.  I handed it to a guy I know - a retired engineer - and he was as feckless as the woman.  I started to look for something sharp - like a knife or screwdriver to puncture the bag, aware that I was getting close to an outcome that would lead to spilling of blood, but don't tell me I can't do something because then I have to fucking do it.  Mind you, I wasn't upset or in a bad mood I just couldn't believe I couldn't open a tea bag.  So there I am in the kitchen, jabbing ferociously at the still sealed packed with a ballpoint pen - it wouldn't have been out of place if I had been shrieking "Banzai!  Banzai!" as I was doing this.  The two people I had asked for help were definitely edging away at this point.

Luckily, my diligence paid off.  I plopped the bag into my cup, poured in some hot water, and started chatting with a friend.  I did notice after the tea had steeped for five minutes that my efforts to free the imprisoned had obviously punctured the tea bag so that I had a cup of hot water full of floating bits of tea leaves.  In my defense I took the cup out to  my engineer friend and showed him the result of my efforts so he could have a nice laugh at my expense.  God knows I laugh at him all the time.

I poured out the tea and had a cup of coffee.  I have learned the meaning of the word "surrender."

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.

The Book is Packed

When that happens, our great natural assets, the instincts, have turned into physical and mental liabilities.

To define the word 'harm' in a practical way, we might call it the result of instincts in collision, which caused physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual damage to people.

Yet these instincts .  .  . often far exceed their natural function.   

Whenever a human being becomes a battleground for the instincts, there can be no peace.

Such is the power of the instincts to overreach themselves.

For every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably upon others, unhappiness follows.

Unreasonable fear that our instincts will not be satisfied leads us to covet the possessions of others, to lust for sex and power, to become angry when our instinctive demands are threatened, to be envious when the ambitions of others seem to be realized while ours are not.

Instincts restored to true purpose!

Once again, look at those dang words: battleground, unreasonable (twice, mind you), angry, threatened, envious, no peace, damage.  What if I was given this option to start my day: you will spend all of your  time waging an invisible war in an internal battleground, fueled by angry, threatened, envious emotions that threaten any possibility of peace.  Sounds like a plan, a shitty plan, gotta be a better plan than that.  And I love the idea of trying to impose my demands and will on others . . . and doing it because I perceive, sometimes correctly, often not, that others are doing better than I am.  No shit!  There are always going to be people out there who are on an easier track than I am.

Instincts On Rampage

How instincts can exceed their proper function.

The collision of instincts can produce anything from a cold snub to a blazing revolution.

We have learned that the satisfaction of instincts cannot be the sole end and aim of our lives.

If we place instincts first, we have got the cart before the horse; we shall be pulled backward into disillusionment.

When the satisfaction of our instincts for sex, security, and society becomes the sole object of our lives, then pride steps in to justify our excesses.

By now the newcomer has probably arrived at the following conclusions: that his character defects, representing instincts gone astray, have been the primary cause of his drinking and failure at life.

Here's an interesting factoid: the words instinct and instincts appear about 35 times in our literature and all but two are in the 12&12.  Moreover, the two times they appear in the Big Book they are not referencing our own personal instincts.  Apparently, after a few years the founders started to be suspicious that they had really missed something important when they were writing the book.  Fair enough - it was sort of dicey and experimental at the start.  Dr. Bob had at least one seance at his house, for chrissake.

Here's one of my favorite lines in the literature: "Instincts on rampage balk at investigation."

Rampage: A period of violent, reckless, or destructive behavior, often involving a person or group rushing around frantically.  It signifies uncontrolled rage and chaos.  Synonyms include frenzy, rage, and uproar.

Bill loved those kinds of images.  He loved to portray alcoholism in graphic, powerful words and images.  I have instincts.  My instincts like to riot violently.  C'mon, whether or not you're a Bill W fan that's some pretty cool shit.

Instincts:  A way of thinking, behaving, or feeling that is not learned; a subconscious, automatic impulse driven by biological survival needs.

Instincts gone astray, exceeding their proper function, with the result that life is deeply, deeply unsettling and painful.  In fact, this state of mind leads to a deeply, deeply unhappy life, to "disillusionment."  I love the words and phrases: collision, battleground, blazing revolution, physical and mental liabilities.  I get the sense that because the instincts weren't properly addressed at the start that the founders really let 'er rip when the 12&12 was written.

Pride: A complex emotion and concept generally defined as a deep sense of pleasure, satisfaction or self-respect.

So pride appears in the literature like a billion times .  .  . I've really started to go down the wormhole.  I better be careful with all this cross-referencing.

Rampage would be an excellent, excellent name for a heavy metal band.

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.

Balance

Balance: Mental steadiness or emotional stability; habit of calm behavior, judgement, etc.; inner harmony between mind, body, and soul, which allows individuals to navigate life's challenges with peace, stability, and a connection to a higher purpose or God.

I ponder frequently the concept of balance.  I try to find the Middle Passage, the Middle Way.  This all comes back to the awareness that I am more comfortable by constitution and habit to seek out the extremes of everything and when I'm in Extreme Mode I'm a highly unpredictable person.  Full acceleration or take a nap.  

In Buddhist practice the Middle Way refers to a spiritual practice that steers clear of both extreme asceticism and sensual indulgence.

Here's one of the promises found in the 12&12 that we can expect if we faithfully practice prayer and meditation.

"One of its first fruits is emotional balance."

Here are some snippets of phrases: Can we stay sober and keep emotional balance?  Throw us off balance.  Put us off balance.  Still far off balance.  Keep in emotional balance.  We will surely keep our balance.

We're thrown, tossed, knocked, shoved off balance until we get some balance and then we get to keep that balance.  See how that works?  No?  I don't get it.  Nobody does.  Don't think about it too deeply.  You  know what it feels like to whipsaw between extremes.  Now you're going to find out how peaceful it is to sit quietly in between those extremes.  It can be a little boring sometimes but it is . . .  peaceful, quiet, peaceful.

Math 101

More from the Plain Language Big Book . . .  And I'd like to repeat myself and reaffirm that I am really enjoying this version of our literature.  I do not find it alarming or heretical in any way.  It has been fun imagining how a big group of alcoholics must have behaved when trying to modernize some of the 100 year old language in our literature.  I bet there were some bruised feelings and offended sensibilities.  I am one of those odd ducks who loves change and newness and adventure but it still drives me crazy.  This quote is from the start of How It Works which many of us have heard hundreds and even thousands of times.  The Steps follow this introductory section and I assure you that not one word has been changed there.

"Alcoholism is a confusing and powerful condition that is unlike anything else in the world  Alcohol is extremely complicated, tricky, and difficult.  Without help, beating alcoholism is too much for one person to handle."

Now compare this to the text as it was originally written: "Remember that we deal with alcohol - cunning, baffling, powerful!  Without help it is too much for us."

Nothing alarming there that I can see.  

Here's something for the math freaks reading . . . 

A rough calculation for me is that I've attended somewhere between 7,000 and 8,000 meetings in my life.  I'm a bit of a liar so let's go with 7,000 and that may even be a lie but humor me, anyway.  I've listened to the opening passage of How It Works 7,000 times.  I'm not saying I've paid attention to the reading of the opening passage 7,000 times but my ass has been in the seat while it has been read.  Let's say it takes five minutes to read this passage plus the 12 Traditions.  7,000 X 5 = 35,000 minutes.  At 60 minutes to the hour that works out to just under 600 hours.  To that I must say: "Are you fucking kidding me?"  If I spent a 40 hour A.A. work week just listening to How It Works being read it would take me 15 weeks of doing nothing but listening to someone reading How It Works.  

That's hilarious and very weird.  Four months of my life sitting and listening to this simple passage.  I'm looking for a glyph of a human head exploding.  

But consider the life that A.A. has given me!  When I was being flushed down the Toilet of Despair at the end of my drinking I would have jumped at the chance to trade four months of my time to get the life I have today. 

Someday I'll try to figure out how many weeks of my life I spent drooling on my couch, drunk and stoned, watching a TV program that I wouldn't recall the next day. THAT would put that 4 months in perspective. 

Wait . . . it gets worse . . . or it gets better . . . uh . . . it . . .  well, some more math!

7,000 meetings X 2 hours/meeting = 14,000 hours.  14,000/40 = 350 40 hour work weeks.  350/52 = 6.7 years.

This is probably an underestimate when you add up all the time I've spent listening to other alcoholics drone on and on about the uninteresting, mundane, trivial minutia of their unimportant lives.  That has to be several weeks just there!

And how many hours other alcoholics have spent listening to me drone on and on a bout all the interesting, exceptional, uber-important minutia of my life!

One Red Cent

In one of my meditation books the theme this morning was the assurance that when I've learned to be happy with myself, inside, then I will be much, much happier with the outside world.  I've learned that the stuff outside of me is not the stuff that's going to make me happy, deep down inside, for when I attach my happiness to that outside stuff then I make my happiness contingent on that stuff and that stuff is going to let me down, eventually.  Don't get me wrong  - there's nothing the matter with stuff.  I have a shit-ton of stuff and I enjoy a lot of it but I know that the enjoyment is contingent on my peace of mind.  Lotsa miserable rich people out there.

When I was getting sober in Indianapolis one of my first sponsors was a successful stock broker who drove a big, white Cadillac and he had a wife and kids and a nice house in a nice suburb.  He was a kind, kind, spiritual man with a big heart and he was also pretty blunt dealing with new twerps like me.  I would hear him talk about how important it was to improve myself from within, that the outside stuff was only window dressing that would never make me deeply happy and I was occasionally tempted to say: "Yeah, well, why don't you give me your car then, you sanctimonious prick."  Luckily, I was too afraid of him at the time to say such a thing but, on second hand, I bet he would have responded with a big belly laugh.  The shit we learn . . . .

Update: I sent a message to Detox Girl yesterday and did not hear back.  Obviously, I have not seen her at a meeting and she's been out of the hospital for a week.  While this is sad and does not make me happy I'm not surprised and I'm not upset.  Remember the Coke machine analogy vis-a-vis Seinfeld?  Most of us can't just walk up and tip it over - we have to get it rocking back and forth a few times and then it goes over.  Maybe she stays sober forever; maybe this is an important but not final step in her journey into sobriety; and maybe she never gets it.  None of that is any of my business.  I helped for my sake.  I gave without any expectation of return.  And for a couple of weeks I was in touch with the young woman who jumped in and did a lot of the shitty, hard work with Detox Girl.  I tapped on my phone from the comfort of my meditation chair and I spent a few hours in the ER.  Maybe the blessing for me was getting to know my friend better?  Maybe the blessing was listening to the insight of SuperK when we got out of the hospital as she shattered - no, not shattered, tempered - my Savior Complex when she observed that Detox Girl seemed to be kind of blase about her hospital experience.  

All good stuff.  All stuff I need to grow.  Stuff that means something and didn't cost me one red cent.

Space Between My Thoughts

"Today I still enjoy getting the approval of others, but I am not willing to pay the price I used to pay to get it.  I will not bend myself into a pretzel to get others to like me.  If I get your approval, that's fine; but if I don't, I will survive without it.  I need to feel a strong and helpful sense of myself.  Such an awareness doesn't happen overnight, and no one's self-awareness is permanent."

A.A. Daily Reflections

I used to be an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.  Today, I'm an egomaniac with a superiority complex.  I said that at a meeting today.  I thought it was clever and totally hilarious.  A couple of twitters.  Maybe a chuckle or a chortle or two but that was it.  Cretins.  I will not dumb down my wit and sink to the level of my audience. 

Or maybe it wasn't that funny.  Maybe that's it.

"With awareness, we realize there is a deep silence that exists behind all of those voices, in that space between thoughts."

Toltecs

I love the imagery of a space between my thoughts.  I love the imagery of all those voices.  They're talking all the time but not into between my thoughts.

"Yet many of us are waiting for some goal to be reached, some status to be attained before we can begin enjoying our lives.  We say things to ourselves like, 'I will be happy when I get this job/accumulate this amount of money/have this relationship.'  There is nothing wrong with wanting to attain or achieve certain things, but if we make our  happiness conditional on reaching certain destination points, our life will become a series of goals to obtain, with each one failing to deliver the  promise of happiness we envisioned.  Happiness can only be found in the present moment, not at some imaginary place in the future."

Toltecs

An Embiggened Spirit

Plain Language Big Book speaketh thusly: 

"If we are able to embrace new ideas and discoveries, why not new views on God?  After all, we were struggling with our lives at just about every level.  We truly needed help.  We were having trouble with our relationships, we couldn't control our emotions, we felt miserable and depressed.  We couldn't earn money or hold onto jobs, we felt useless and afraid, and we were unhappy.  We couldn't even help other people.  If connecting with a Higher Power could help us solve even a few of these problems,wasn't that worth exploring?  Of course it was."

I have a rotating, constantly evolving and changing grouping of friends that I keep in my thoughts while I'm in my Quiet Time.  I am remembering a woman whose daughter is undergoing treatment for a particularly tricky and malignant type of cancer; a man who is fighting stage four cancer himself; a man whose sister died suddenly from a heart attack; a woman who is drinking again and mostly unresponsive after accumulating seven years of sobriety; a man in the midst of a maybe long-term relationship break-up who was waffling and dithering about going through with a trip to Belgium alone instead of - as planned - with his maybe, maybe not significant other and who went after some encouragement from me; SuperK who is dealing with the slow-motion, long-term fall-out of losing a much beloved brother-in-law to cancer (Ed. Note: Don't you love the phrase "losing" to describe death?  I cannot think of anyone more difficult to "lose" than a dead person.  He or she is right where they were when they died unless you've moved them somewhere else); a few A.A. sons and daughters who are moving through a variety of situations and challenges that we all have gone through and are of no great import in the long run; and, of course, Detox Girl who has been quasi-responsive when Chloe and I get in touch with her but has not reached out on her own and is not to my knowledge attending any meetings or recovery groups of any kind.  Eventually we all have to do some work or we're going to keep getting what we've always been getting.  It can be tragic standing on the firing line of alcoholism.

"A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man."

Jebediah Springfield.