The Next 200 Miles: You and Your Tedious Thoughts

"Give us to go blithely on our business this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

Robert Louis Stevenson

You are not your thoughts.

Most of your thoughts are the result of you simply revisiting what you have already thought before.  They're not new thoughts.  You are thinking about the same useless crap over and over.  These sticky thoughts are very, very sticky.  They're hard to shake loose and when they reoccur they take you hostage.  I relitigate wrongs all the time.  I hang onto a current irritation or upset with a ferocious grip.  I go back and think about issues that will always be issues: my health, my loved ones, my finances.  Sticky thoughts.  My Greatest Hits.  I'm dying!  I don't have enough money!  My loved ones will leave me!  Garbage Bag Guy will pile up more garbage bags!

I love the idea that each day we have 6,000 distinct thoughts and 90% of them are repetitive.  (Ed. Note: This is all kind of suspicious.  Who, exactly, is counting these thoughts?)

I went to high school with a man who I believe embodies humility.  He's a tremendous athlete, quite handsome, a graduate of Harvard who had a spectacularly successful business career in finance,  information that is almost impossible to extract and when I bring it up he deflects immediately, and not in a shallow, insincere way but with what I sense is a genuine humility.

When he was in his 50s he told me that he was attending Divinity School at night, that he wanted to become a minister.  I was floored.  I was flummoxed.  I was struck speechless and I'm never speechless.  I always have speech.  "When did you become religious?" I asked, no doubt with some overt skepticism.  He simply said: "I've always been religious."  I'm so used to over-the-top, in-your-face, look-at-me religious people, so on the lookout for the occasional sanctimonious asshole that I forget the world is full of people who pursue their ideal of a Higher Power with perspective and humility and true intent.

We were exchanging some text messages about an upcoming reunion and about some of his old correspondence to me when the discussion veered into grace.  Being a man of the cloth his ideal, of course and naturally, was to talk about the idea that grace is a godly, heavenly thing, given to mortals who don't deserve it and consequently the source of all that is good in this life. He also talked about the practical application of grace in our daily lives.  Being an iconoclast I prefer to emphasize grace the other way around, concentrating on simple, human grace instead of the divine kind, but we both end up in the same place: recognizing the otherworldliness of grace while applying it to our minute to minute existence.

His notes almost made me cry.  They were so passionate while remaining so sincere that they were obviously deeply held and unshakeable.  Isn't that what we're all looking for?  The surety that we've found a way to move forward in our lives with kindness and love, forsaking (Ed. Note: I'm getting full of myself.  This is a good Biblical turn of a phrase.  Dammit!) selfish motives and shallow pleasures?

Forgiveness Heals All Wounds

Grace:  A willingness to be fair and forgive; the exercise of love, kindness, mercy, favor.

I've always loved this concept, this quality.  In my Christian upbringing, grace was primarily described as God's unmerited, undeserved favor - his free gift of love, forgiveness, and strength given to me despite my sins.  Sigh.  This still irritates me.  It feels full of self-importance on God's part.  What a big guy you are, God!  We're made with faults and defects by God and then God forgives us for our faults and defects?  When I'm made the next creator of the universe?  Then I'm designing life so that there aren't these faults and defects that need to be forgiven. While I do believe in Divine grace and am grateful to receive it this still sounds to me like doing something nice and expecting recognition.  Today, in my day to day activities, I try to extend grace to everyone I come across and to do it with humility and a lack of ego.  This is not easy and I fail much of the time but I've gotten a lot better at giving everyone and everything a break and not doing it with too much self-importance and self-congratulation.  God or a Higher Power or the universe has bestowed so much grace to me, buried me under tons of grace, treated me with love and kindness when I didn't deserve it and so much more often then treating me poorly, that I feel a calling to try to return the favor, to pay it back.

My morning meditation book today: "We don't have to have all the answers, or act in the most mature way, or be the best friend ever.  There is room for error in everything because nothing is gained in perfection the first time around.  We can make mistakes because mistakes are sometimes the only way to perfection."

When that driver in front of me doesn't use his turn signal today I think: "Eh.  Guy made a mistake" instead of flying off into a judgemental rage.  I continue to practice pausing a beat when I don't like something, letting awareness and perspective seep in, finding that much of the time I roll my eyes at the thought that I could have gotten angry and ruined my day and not changed anything and for something so unimportant.  So I beep at the guy and make an obscene hand gesture?  This is going to correct something?  This is going to make the guy think: "Oh, man, you're right, sorry.  I won't do that again, ever?"  Nine times out of ten it's just going to provoke an equivalent response and then not only have I ruined my day I've degraded someone else's day as well.

"Forgiveness heals any wound."

The Toltecs, the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, I mean, c'mon, forgiveness as a way of bestowing grace on oneself is an important load-bearing cornerstones of every spiritual practice that I know of.

On a Lighter Side

"Saying no from a place of anger can add force to our no, and for a moment we feel powerful.  But this feeling of power is illusory, and it always leaves us with an emotional hangover of negativity after the anger subsides.  It also causes suffering for those caught in its path."

The Toltecs

"An epiphany is something that comes to you out of the blue that your sponsor has been telling you for the last six months."

The 12 Steps save you from suicide.

The 12 Traditions save you from homicide.

A General Service committment makes you want to do both.

Lots Of Irritating Guys

You are driving your car and about to enter a long stretch of desert road when you see this sign: "The next 200 miles - You and Your tedious thoughts."

I read a study which estimates that a person has somewhere around 60,000 thoughts each day and that 95% of them are the same thoughts they had yesterday.

It's the breath.  Pay attention to that breath.  It's a great anchor and it's one thing that we share with every living creature on the planet.  When one of those 60,000 tedious, repetitive thoughts pop into my mind I try to remember to say: "Huh.  Look at that thought" and then refocus my attention back onto the next thought.  I try to remember that this is perfectly normal, that my brain has the ability to think and it's going to do it and it is not at all pleased that I'm trying to reestablish some semblance of control over its desire to return to tedious, repetitive, self-involved thoughts.  It's frustrating enough that most of what I'm thinking about is crap but to make matters worse it's the same crap I thought about yesterday.  I can't even come up with any new crap to think about.

One of my eternal loops of thinking is to remember that there is a rhyme and reason to my thinking, that it keeps me safe and it helps me stay prepared for what's going to come next.  That's well and good.  My problem is that the preparation mostly involves worry and planning about illogical and implausible things.  I have enough food.  I have a dry, warm, comfortable place to live.  I have friends and family and lots and lots of conveniences.  Nothing to see here, folks, move along.  So where does my mind go?  Garbage Bag Guy!  Hot Tub Guy!  Boat Guy!  Okay, okay, Garbage Bag Guy and Boat Guy are the same guy but it sounds better to have three guys to be pissed at instead of just two guys.

What can I tell you?  There are a lot of irritating guys out there.

Where Have All the Garbage Bags Gone, O Where O Where Have They Gone?

I hope today that all of us remember that we're perfect just the way we are.  Just for today.  That doesn't mean I'm not a work in progress, that there aren't things I need to improve or to work on.  It means that I should give myself a break.  If I'm honest about it I'm never going to fully measure up to the impossibly irrational expectations I have of myself.  I suspect I believe deep down inside that I can achieve perfection when the surface reality is that if I can get to the point where I'm not a total fuckup then I'm doing okay.

I peeked over the fence today into Garbage Bag Guy's backyard and all the refuse was gone.  When does he get this stuff done?  I didn't hear him pile the bags up and I didn't hear him remove the bags?  Why doesn't he get a paying job so he no longer has to stack overfilled garbage bags right up to my fence line?  The format of the meeting yesterday - when the bags were still there and when I believed they would remain there indefinitely - is for the leader to read a paragraph from the first 164 pages of The Big Book and kick off the discussion based on that reading.  The sadistic son of a bitch that was in the hot seat selected this: "Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick, too.  We asked God to help us show them the same pity, tolerance, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.  When a person offended, we said to ourselves: "This is a sick man.  How can I be helpful to him? God save me from being angry.  Thy will be done."

Really, really annoying.

I do have to say that I find Bill's wording here a little condescending.  Big Spiritual Seaweed gets to show love and tolerance to some poor guy who doesn't know better.  It reeks to me of pious elitism.  Look at me - I'm in recovery!  A few years ago I was taking a shot of vodka first thing in the morning to steady my nerves and now I'm going to tolerate your shortcomings?  Pretty Big of me.  I love the words "pious" and "sanctimonious."  In layman's terms?  "My shit doesn't stink."

Garbage Bag Guy

Because I live in a warm climate homes generally don't have a basement - they have a crawl space.  I don't know - maybe no homes have a basement.  What do I look like?  A home builder?  In fact, upon some reflection, I have no idea why homes have basements.  I just assumed they're places to store more crap that you no longer need, that you never needed, and that you should just throw in the garbage.  I may have read once that cold weather climates cause the ground to shrink and expand so a basement is needed to counteract this.  I have no idea why I would remember that.  It sounds like something I'd make up.  I explained to a friend that the reason my hair was standing straight up in the air as the result of riding my motorcycle to the meeting.  "You have a motorcycle?" she asked.  "I have three motorcycles." I said.  If I'm going to make shit up I'm going to go all in.  If she believes I have a motorcycle I might as well own three of them.

Where I am here?  Oh, yeah, we had sneaky rats get into the crawl space a few years back, making entry through some poorly sealed openings that I guess allow the crawl space to breathe or something.  Get some air flow through that crawl space and I'll tell you this as well - crawl space is an apt description because you're going to have to crawl to get around in there.  A nice dude comes out, seals up the openings and catches all the rats, of which there were an alarmingly large number.  Now, the rats have returned.  The sneaky bastards found a small hole around a water pipe or electrical conduit or sewage outlet and took up residence again.  Not the same rats, I'm assuming, maybe some relatives.  Dude comes back out and is catching rats and sealing holes and all will be well, all will be well, all will be well.

I started to ponder why rats and why in my house?  We have fruit trees all around my property so I'm going to make an effort to keep any fallen oranges and tangerines collected and disposed of.  What else?  Where else for the source of the rats?  I peer over the fence into Boat Guy's back yard and what do I see but a whole ton of garbage bags which appear to be filled with bottles and cans for recycling.  I can only hope that's what they contain.  God help me if it's actual garbage.  For the record . . . he no longer has the boat - replacing that with a beat up old truck - so maybe he needs a new nickname?  Garbage Bag Guy? 

No way this is allowable under our community rules.  But I'm stuck again in the Conundrum:  Do I escalate this by contacting park management or by confronting Garbage Bag Guy directly?  It's amazing how things can spiral out of control once official mechanisms get activated.  Nonetheless, it's not fair to me that he's behaving like this.  No one else in the community is collecting cans and bottles for recycling.  No one else is parking junk trucks in their driveway.  No one else is irritating the shit out of me.

Fair disclosure - I'm hitting another age milestone that ends in a zero in December.  I've had some struggles with these numerically significant transitions.  It's uncomfortable to ponder the passage of another decade.  You look around at your friends and think: "This is it?  This is the best I can do?"  When you are young the End of Things is so distant it has no meaning.  Now the Grim Reaper is on the horizon.  He's still out there a bit but I can make something out and if I use binoculars I can definitely see someone in a black hoodie with a sharpened farming implement.  I have to be aware at times like this.  Boat Guy . . .  er . . . Garbage Bag Guy is no longer making a lot of noise so there's that.  Is the status quo bad enough to risk a new status quo?  Always possible that a new reality will  irritate the shit out of me in a different way.

Often, keeping my mouth shut works out best.  When I talk . . . bad things happen.  When I'm silent . . . things work out.

The Crying Baby

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it's the same problem you had last year."

John Foster Dulles

There may be many things we want to alter in our lives.  But unless we stop talking and start doing something, those changes won't happen.  We can start by setting a small, easily attainable goal.

"My philosophy of life is No Pain, No Pain."

George Carlin

Resistance to pain = Suffering

Me.  I said that.  Everyone said that, maybe, could be!  It's talking to me, that pain.  It's sending me a message.  It's keeping me safe from physical and emotional danger so why do I spend so much time trying to get rid of it?  Today I try to look right at the pain, to pay attention to the pain, to figure out whether it's the good pain, trying to keep me safe, or the bad pain, the useless pain I hallucinate up in my mind worrying about non-events?

When I first started traveling on long overnight flights of many hours I would occasionally be seated near the dreaded Crying Baby.  The best antidote to a long flight on a cramped airplane is to sleep as much of it away as possible.  A Crying Baby doesn't make the task of falling asleep while seated upright on a jostling aircraft any easier.  Initially, I thought that the babies were doing it just to fuck with me.  Then I thought the airlines were scrutinizing the seating chart so that they could put as many babies in my section as possible, assuming that at least one of the babies might morph into the dreaded Crying Baby.  Then I read at one point that the human body is more programmed to notice a change in incoming stimuli than to notice the stimuli itself.  If I try to ignore the Crying Baby I am hyper-aware of any fluctuations in the volume, tone, and timbre of the wailing but if I just relax and pay attention to the howling my brain gets bored and begins to start to ignore it.  It doesn't ignore it completely - it's a Squalling Baby! - but it removes most of the anger and frustration I feel which is really what is keeping me awake.

Honestly, I'm more irritated by the two boring people sitting behind me who spend half the flight droning on and on about absolutely nothing.  The Crying Baby, at least, might be responding to the pain in the inner ear that can occur with the change in cabin pressure as the plane ascends and descends.  The baby has a reason to cry while the two adults talking loudly about absolutely nothing in a cabin full of people who are trying to sleep?

They're going to hell.

What Is Good Behavior In Alcoholics Anonymous?

One of my friends in Alcoholics Anonymous is a young woman - young-ish woman - who grew up with two alcoholic parents, the father taking a powder and leaving his kids to fend for themselves with no guidance or support after subjecting them to years of disdain and disbelief.  This kid got herself involved with a piece of shit A.A. member - yes, we have them, too - with a ton of sobriety and a big presence in one of our local villages.  Fair enough and not unheard of.  SuperK and I got things going when we were both pretty new in sobriety.  So it happens.  And it happens because we're in an environment where everyone is sharing or should be sharing, anyway, very intimate feelings of sadness and loneliness.  If you're a piece of shit predatory type then you're in a pretty fertile hunting ground.  I should say this: I do not know the guy.  Maybe he's just a minor piece of shit and not a huge piece of shit but I'm gonna stand by my classification until proven otherwise.  This mixing of all kinds of personalities and histories is, of course, one of A.A.'s greatest strengths while being the source of the occasional great pitfall.  A man with a lot of sobriety should have not behaved this way; or should have behaved this way only with great caution.  He is still a presence at two meetings that my friend visited regularly but is now too abashed to attend.  He's fine, apparently, blithely unconcerned about how this relationship affected someone new enough that drinking again could be a plausible outcome for his victim.

Here's the point of my judgemental screed:  I'm not a close, day-to-day friend with this woman but we talk at the Keep It Complicated meeting regularly so I was floored when I found out she had suffered this abuse at the hands of this guy.  I was floored that I didn't know one solitary thing about the relationship that she was invested in so heavily that it really caused some emotional damage when it ended.  She mentioned it not once to me.   Did anyone know about it?  Did her sponsor know about it?  I know her sponsor very well and find it hard to believe she would have watched this behavior without weighing in with some pointed, unequivocal advice.  We try not to give direct advice but if you tell me that you're going to feed your whole arm into a wood chipper I'm going to say something.

Okay, here's the real point, finally: Talk to people!  Tell people what you're doing!  Get some fucking feedback, for chrissake!  If someone talks to me about something going on I really, really try not to be dismissive or critical but what I can do is to ask a lot of good questions that allow the other person to hear themselves talk out loud about what they're doing.  How many times have I listened to myself talk to another member and after a bit thought: "Well, I sound like an idiot."  The other person did not have to tell me I'm an idiot.  I sounded like an idiot to myself.

Irony. Irony!

Irony:  A contrast between expectation and reality.  (Ed. Note: Yeah, alcoholics don't do that shit.)  (Ed. Note: See that?  THAT'S irony.)  It occurs when a statement means an opposite of what was said or an outcome is the reverse of what is expected.

Have I mentioned before how important I think it is to be present, to be in the moment?  Have I mentioned before how confounding it is personally to constantly forget how important it is to be present, to be in the moment?  Maybe this is why the reminder shows up again and again in the spiritual and recovery literature I rely on.  Maybe this is why one of our most important slogans in Alcoholics Anonymous is "One Day At A Time.  I should have this tattooed on my forehead backward so that every time I look in the mirror to remind myself who the problem is I'll be reminded what the solution is.

"Too often we put off our own happiness until some event is realized in the future.  The result is a cycle of setting and achieving milestones, only to realize after each one is achieved that it failed to do for us what we had thought  it would.  This is why many great masters of all traditions have stressed the importance of living in the present moment."

The Toltecs

I ascribe to the belief that if I want to be "happy" in the future then I damn well better work on being "happy" today.  While it's OK to be a striver, to work at improving and arriving at a "better" place - a stable relationship, children, extra money, a successful career - if I make my "happiness" contingent on achieving these milestones I'm going to be in danger of screwing up today.  I have found that a "truth" in my life is that when I quit grasping at something then it comes to me more easily and more naturally.  Which can be frustrating and a good example of one of the ways my Higher Power can be an ironic, tricky son of a gun.  An example: I came into A.A. extremely broke and some extra money, some "fun" money, some "bullshit" money only started arriving when I realized I could lead a good, satisfying life without the extra.  The irony is that now that I have some of it I need less of it.

What Was I Thinking?

The more I meditate the more awareness I have.  The more present I become.  I spent very little time in the present before I got sober. Our minds are meant to think.  My mind ran hog-wild for the first thirty years of my life.  It did whatever it wanted and what it wanted, apparently, was to relitigate my past, especially concentrating on slights and insults while ignoring any instances where I might have been at fault, or to blow into the future, where terrible things were happening to me or where I wasn't getting what I wanted.  This doesn't make me bad or even unusual.  The ability to be present is not easy to achieve.  The fact that the mind does a lot of thinking is good: it prepares me for the future and it reminds me of past failures and dangers so that I can better prepare for the future.  Good for the brain and fair enough.  The misery comes when I let my mind spend every waking minute in the past and in the future because at that point I'm never in the moment.

The more I explore meditation and mindfulness the more I find that the call to be present, to be in the here and now, is Task One in almost every philosophy and religious, spiritual concern that I've ever run into and - still, to this day - I find it to be a fleeting skill.  I find myself in the past and in the future and ignoring where I am at this moment, right here, right now.  I miss everything.  I miss life when I'm in the past and in the future.  One memory seared into my white matter is of a day in the Midwest, a Saturday, where I had errands to run on one of my two days off, lots of errands because I'm a Type A, it's-never-enough kind of human being, and I can't remember if it was Fall or Spring but it was a beautiful day in one of the two best seasons when you live in a cold winter/hot summer climate, and I was putting some groceries in the trunk of my car after careening from one critically important chore to another, when I looked up at a blue sky with puffy clouds not careening along, a cool breeze touching my skin, and I thought: "I missed the whole day, this whole, beautiful, perfect day."  Some of this is okay: life's life and we have stuff to do.  You can't ignore a crying, hungry baby with a full diaper because you want to meditate but the point is to be present, to enjoy the moment as best as you can.  I did not have the ability yet to be where I was.  I was always elsewhere.  

Have you ever done something really stupid and thought afterwards: "What the hell was I thinking?"

Exactly.  Precisely.  What was I thinking?  

Who Do You Love?

One of my favorite mantras is "Love someone for who they are and not who you want them to be."  It surely releases me from a shit-ton of expectations.  I tend to create an image in my mind of how I want everyone, including myself, to behave and then I'm disappointed when they don't live up to that often ridiculous image.  It's difficult for me to not project how I'd like things to happen, but that's a hallmark of conditional love.  "If you behave like this, then I'll love you."

Today I strive to let go of the projected images I have of people close to me.  I ask myself if I love the person for who they really are or do I love them for who I think they are?

Swaggering Along

It took me twenty-five years to become an overnight success.

I've been talking a bit to a new guy who's been showing up daily.  This guy has got Game.  You know the kind of person?  Handsome, fit, wealthy, owns his own real estate brokerage firm, totally confident in his own person?  A no fear kind of guy, a guy strutting the strut.  Married with a five year old daughter he dotes on.  Just brimming with confidence and self-assurance.  (Ed. Note: This, as we know, guarantees almost nothing.  He drinks alcoholically and is attending meetings daily as a prerequisite for keeping his license after a recent DWI.  Whatever gets you here, right?)  Frankly, there's so much swagger in his persona that I'm always surprised when he shows up again.  I'm curious as to what his back story is.  What got bad enough?

The one area of his life that seems to trouble him is his marriage.  He implies that his wife is shut down, uncommunicative, with working and being a mom taking up all of her energy and time, and this state of his marriage has him concerned.  I can only imagine the damage incurred living with an alcoholic exuding that kind of confidence. I went to a high school that had a lot of rich kids and there were some classmates who were total idiots but insulated from their idiocy by their family's money, swaggering through life blithely, unaware or unconcerned that they were idiots.  I hope that he can step back and see his part in this marriage, to see that maybe the problems started with him.

I'm not All In on this dude, yet.  I like him but I don't trust him.

Hang In There

"If you view life through the eyes of an artist, then life is no longer a work of art; rather, it becomes a series of goals to achieve and contests to win.  You are happy when things go 'right' and upset when they go 'wrong.'  Viewing life this way can make for a very difficult experience."                        The Toltecs

I used to look at art - Art - with a bored and skeptical eye.  I thought it was something that needed to be "understood" to be appreciated.   I would go to a big art museum believing that I had to look at every piece of art and read everything posted about every piece of art that I looked at.  It was frustrating, exhausting, and boring, to be honest about it, standing in front of a painting, vaguely aware that the gallery had dozens more paintings to be "gotten through."  Like I can't look at the sun setting over the ocean without knowing "why" the scene was so moving.  It's lovely!  It's beautiful!  It's calming! It's a wonderful experience! I don't need to read up on why the colors are pleasing to the eye or why nature can be so centering.  I like it; I look at it; I go home and eat dinner, better for the experience, happier for the experience.

I have some art books on my desk and I try to spend a few minutes looking at art each day.  I'm trying to balance actually following through on picking up the book and not beating my obsessive-compulsive TypeA ass up when I don't pick one up - it's meant to be fun and illuminating, not a chore like picking weeds in the hots sun.  I've learned a lot about art but not as much as I've forgotten.  I was kind of agitated this morning, the prayer and meditation barely making a dent in my agita, so I picked up one of the books, looked at three pictures - Three!  Just Three! - and immediately calmed down.  I read the short blurbs on each of the pictures which cued me into some stuff I wouldn't have noted before and stuff I'll probably forget about but who cares?  These were masterful works and I enjoyed all of them, aware that sometimes a painting will leave me uninvolved.  Today, when SuperK and I go to a museum we spend an hour in a gallery, sit down and rest our feet with a cup of coffee, and then dip back in for another half hour and that's it.  We're full.  We're done.  And I've found that some of the joy comes in the reflective reaction that comes later.  I feel better after the fact than I do while I'm doing the actual looking.  The beauty has seeped in and affected me but it takes some time for that emotion to be realized.  It's akin to watching my breath as I meditate - even though my mind flits about, here and there, near and anon, I end up with a calmer, more focused day.  What's better - anticipating a roller coaster ride, dropping down that first drop, or howling about the excitement with your friends as you exit the ride?  I never want to go to an art museum; I enjoy-ish the experience when I'm there, and I'm a bigger, better, badder dude for having experienced the experience.

Try this: pick out an incredibly famous piece of art, pull it up on your computer, and then look at it for ten minutes.  That's a long, long time.  You'll get bored and antsy but hang in there.  I bet you'll notice something in minute seven that you missed at the outset.  I read about a guy who went to a museum and spent an hour in front of a painting for 100 days.  I could not do that but I enjoyed reading about it.  He became kind of a minor celebrity at the museum.  He noticed things that eluded him on the first few viewings.  He hung in there.

Hang in there!

So Many Decisions

One of the young people I talk to regularly in The Fellowship is a woman whose father was never a presence in her life.  And to make bad matters worse, he's currently homeless and drug-addicted.  Her aunt is in touch with him periodically so she gets general updates but not much more than that.  She's a pretty fierce person and has slotted her father into a safe slot - she doesn't talk about him and is relatively comfortable with the status quo.  What are you going to do, right?  People make decisions that affect us and that's their right, even when the decisions are selfish and harm us.  The world can be a bitch.  All of us deserve a loving family and a safe place to live and enough to eat but not all of us are going to get all of those things.  We can deal with it or we can bitch and whine and complain and change absolutely nothing.

She got a message from her aunt that her father had a gift for her.  Given her past experiences she was sure that it would come to naught but - lo and behold! - her aunt stopped by with $2,000, all in twenties, most of the bills soiled and well-worn.  I spoke with her about this, miraculously refraining from telling her what to do -  who better than me to run your life, right?  given my skills in having successfully navigating the ups and downs of my world - while tossing out different suggestions about how she might respond.  My closest A.A. friends do this with me.  From time to time and more often than I'd expect they'll come up with a suggestion that is perfect for the situation, one that I simply hadn't thought of.  Often I'll end up doing something that had already occurred to me but every now and then I'll say "Huh.  That's perfect.  That's perfect" and I'll go that route.  Ultimately, we all need to find our own way and make decisions based on our own knowledge and intuition.  There's very rarely a perfectly right way or a perfectly wrong way.  If she had said she was going to keep the money and send her dad a letter telling him to fuck off I would have chimed in as that would have been pretty obviously a bad action but - other than that kind of egregious behavior - the decision is not mine.

She ended up keeping the money.  I think this is a great, great decision, one that honors her father and his efforts.  For him to collect that much money and keep it secure in an unsecured environment was quiet an accomplishment, quite an effort, and she honored him by accepting the gift.  One of the weirder and more difficult skills I had to learn was accepting a compliment graciously.  When I pass something along to a friend or loved one I'd rather not hear: "Oh, you don't have to do that."  No shit I don't have to do that.   I'm doing that because I want to do it.

Lot of wisdom in that decision.  I'm guessing she's second-guessing the decision but that's what we do.  And who knows how it plays out?  Sometimes I make what I think is the right and most appropriate decision and down the road it doesn't make things better.   All I can do is the best I can do at the time with the skills and information I have at hand.  All I can do is take what I think is the next Right Action and then see what God has in store for me and everyone else.

Pity V Empathy V Sympathy, Oh My.

"No matter what your circumstances may be, you always have a choice.  Don't give it away by making the statement 'I have to' and believing it.  Nothing breaks stagnation like remembering you have a choice.  Next time you feel obligated to do something, remember that you don't really have to unless you want to."

The Toltecs

From the Grapevine:  "When I took the Seventh Step, I had to give God the good and the bad, to do with as he saw fit, not as I saw fit.  I don't get to decide which is which any more than I get to decide what he sees fit to remove and when it gets removed, I just had to be totally willing.  It's God's time, not mine.  That's when people started noticing, even before I did.  Over time, God started taking away some of my defects of character, that quite frankly, I didn't even think were defects until people started complimenting me for no longer behaving in the way I once thought perfectly acceptable.  Who knew?"

A lot of the time I can confuse pity with compassion.  I want to be compassionate, to have concern for the well-being of someone else while at the same time respecting their free will.  It means being present for someone while respecting their strengths and capabilities.  I try to make myself willing to help but only if the other person wants that help.

Pity:  An emotion defined as a sympathetic sorrow, sadness, or compassion evoked by the suffering, distress, or misfortunes of others. While it can act as a bridge to empathy, it can also carry negative connotations of condescension or contempt when it implies a sense of superiority over the person receiving it.

Empathy:  The ability to understand, share, and experience another person's emotions from their perspective. It bridges the gap between individuals by allowing you to step into someone else's shoes and vicariously feel their emotional state without taking it on as your own

Pity is feeling sorry for someone and assuming that I have the capability to fix whatever I think needs fixing.  It means trying to carry their pain for them instead of allowing them to discover their own ability to change what they don't like for the better.  Pity is when I let my concern for others overtake me, make me want to step in and make decisions for them, help them when they should be helping themselves.

We carry the message - we don't carry the drunk.

Happy BD, Willie!

My dear friend Willie has been sober for 32 years today.  That's a long time although I have a sneaking suspicion he still thinks it's okay to drink on weekends and holidays.  We call that California Sober.  My stance on anniversaries (in most of the country) or birthdays (here on the Left Coast) is to balance gratitude - I do not stay sober on my own, without a Higher Power and the support of The Fellowship - but I do not stay sober without personally doing a lot of work.  So I share the date with my friends.  I hope it lets new people see that it can actually be done - because I was not a high bottom drunk - and because it's a gift I can give to the people who have been with me every step of the way.  With some spiritual growth comes the ability to actually be happy for the successes and achievements of others instead of stewing in a pot of envy and jealousy.

Here's the SoCal way:

Happy Birthday to you.

Happy Birthday to you.

Happy Biiiiiiirrrrrthday, dear Willie.

Happy Birthday to you.

Keep coming back . . . . . Sober!

One of my little fantasies is to return to the open Saturday night speaker meeting in North Indianapolis, the site of my first halting foray into the world of Alcoholics Anonymous.  I clearly remember the buzz of good energy in the room - the loudness and laughter and vibrancy surprised the hell out of me - and the fact that I was very, very suspicious of the motives of the guys suggesting I buy something called The Big Book.  I assumed that was the grift - sell merchandise and make money - so I lied and said I didn't have the money, but the guys got around that crap by telling me to just take the Book then and pay them back whenever I came up with the cash (I still have that Book, well used and in deplorable shape but full of notes and underlinings that mean a lot to me today).  I was also flummoxed at the lead that night - a guy who ran moonshine somewhere in the Deep South, spent a lot of time in jail, differences that I used for a while to keep a distance between me and recovery.  I was definitely NOT looking for the similarities.

I talk to anyone new who comes to the Keep It Complicated meeting that has anchored my California sobriety.  I do this with a spirit of service and love while fully aware that most of these people are not going to stay sober - at least not now - and that they're going to come and go no matter what I do.  I'm not cynical at all because I know that It Takes What It Takes.  Maybe I'm the flimsy reed they grab onto?  I remember the moonshine-running hillbilly from West Virginia who told his story to a roomful of laughing drunks almost 40 years ago.  He helped to hook me.  I like the imagery of all the regular members of a group holding onto fishing lines with hooks on the end so that if you're new, walking through our midst, maybe one of the hooks will grab you.

Where Are You Right Now?

"You take yourself too seriously!  You are too damn important in your own mind.  That must be changed!"

Carlos Castaneda

Today I can remember that I am no better - and no worse - than anyone else.

Go With the Flow is a good reminder to help me stop going against the current of life.  When I find myself worn out I need to check to see if it's the result of swimming against today's current.

The more I pursue the elusive, just out of reach, state of serenity and peacefulness that I crave, the more I run into the concept of Mindful living.  Being in the moment, staying in the moment, aware of sounds and touch and coolness and warmth, One Day at a Time in A.A. speak.  How much of my life is on autopilot!  My brain taking care of a task that isn't in front of me while I'm oblivious to what's happening to me, right now.

Here's a story: a Washington newspaper commissioned a study where they paid a violinist to busk in a local subway station.  In the time he was playing about 2,000 people passed by, either coming or going, many of them busy with work and families and understandably preoccupied, living in the future or the past and not in the present.  Cameras showed that 6 people paused to listen for a while.  6/2,000 = .003 or three tenths of a percent.  A rounding error.  Statistically insignificant.  A sure bet.   Here's the catch: the busker was a world famous violinist playing one of the most difficult Beethoven violin concertos written by that musical genius on a 3 1/2 million dollar violin.

Talk about a missed opportunity

Made Up Medical Specialities

So I took the only action available to bring some calmness and balance into my life vis-a-vis my odd heart rhythms and skipped beats and I went to the doctor.  I don't really mind going to the doctor because they rarely find anything alarming or concerning.  My old self would imagine that I had some alarming or concerning disease or condition that was going to kill me dead in a cruel and imaginative way while not going to the doctor, apparently preferring to Imagine the Worst from the privacy of my own home.  Take action or fret myself into a tizzy?  In this current situation I did the next indicated thing.  I realized that it's going to be hard to stay calm when I can hear the Grim Reaper rustling around in the bushes outside my bedroom window, sharpening his scythe, and my years in Alcoholics Anonymous have given me great regard for calmness.  Or does The Reaper carry a sickle?  I can't remember.  Maybe he's a modern Reaper, adapting to the times, packing a Glock and wearing a bullet proof vest.  Wouldn't put it past the Angel of Death.  After all it's not like the old days when he could unleash an army of rats carrying fleas into the general populace and let the Bubonic Plague wipe out half the population of Europe.  THAT was the Grim Reaper that had some clout.

Nothing significant presented itself which wasn't surprising given the fact that my symptoms are intermittent and sporadic.  That's the good news.  But nothing definitive presented itself, either.  My doctor didn't say: "What?  Get the fuck out of here" and send me on my way with a friendly pat on the ass.  He asked me to make an appointment with a cardiologist for some further tests.  A cardiologist!  I don't think I ever had an appointment with a medical specialist before this year when I've seen an endodontist, have an upcoming appointment with an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor to remove a growth on my tongue, and been advised to visit a Cardiologist.  Frankly, I had always assumed that those were just made up words that doctors used when they were stumped by something.  They'd send you off to the periodontist hoping that you'd be too confused and intimidated to do anything.  Then, when you came back later with the same symptoms they'd ask, with a smug look on their face: "Well, what did the proctologist have to say about that?"  When you admitted you hadn't actually seen the rheumatologist they could wash their hands of the whole affair.

Taking good action beats worrying about The Unknown.  This I know to be true.  It's comforting to know that I have health insurance and good health care practitioners.  No one is shouting: "What the fuck!  What the fuck is that thing on your tongue!?  Get away from me with that thing!"  Today I feel a great sense of calm: it isn't a critical problem but it isn't completely resolved.  Taking the action was the thing.  When I need to do something and I don't do it or when I need to wait patiently and then rush headlong into the maelstrom . . . that's when the problems arise.  So, I have a cardiologist appointment in a month.  Best I can do.

"I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect."

Gibbon

No Way, Jose

"Fanaticism describes a rigid attachment to knowledge with an excessive intolerance of opposing views.  It is driven by a need to believe in something 100 percent . . . Anything that contradicts or puts into question the sustainability of the belief is a direct threat, and a fanatic will defend the belief at any cost."

We exist in a highly polarized political world right now, one where it often boils down to Us versus Them, or Me versus You.  Every so often I get sucked into a conversation with a Fanatic who holds opposing views and - much more rarely - I try to "reason" with this person.  Hoo Dog, what a waste of my time!  I have no problem with trying to see an issue from a different viewpoint but where I get into trouble is when I'm engaged with someone who is discarding facts and reason to defend their beliefs.  The shit people believe!  There's naturally a lot of nuance in deciding whether or not a government should spend this or that amount of money on the military or social programs or health care.  That makes sense.  But some people refuse to open their minds to an opposing viewpoint, preferring instead to be spoon-fed dubious information that supports their point of view.  I'm sure I do it to some degree but Alcoholics Anonymous has suggested that my serenity will be well serviced if I learn to pause and consider, to see if my point of view is supported with facts and reason, and - guess what? - sometimes I'm living on bullshit, too.

No way, Jose.

It reminds me of my first few years in A.A. where you could NOT tell me anything that knocked me off whatever preconceived notions I had.  It was only through hard experience and repeated failures that I learned that maybe - just maybe  - my way wasn't the best way.  Shooting heroin and driving a car?  But I'm a good driver!  Drinking a twelve pack during lunch break?  But I'm a great employee!

"Everything will come and go in front of you, but you will remain the same."

The Buddha

"He lived a short distance from his own body."

James Joyce

Goddam Ducks

No one is normal - it just looks that way from across the street.

When we're in public, to fit in and be accepted, we often present an image of ourselves that we think others wish to see.  This image reflects who we think we're supposed to be and how we think we're supposed to act,  In reality, this image exists only in your mind.  Trying to live up to that image only leads to suffering.  When it's not benefiting you or the other person, drop your image and be who you are.

I normally sleep like a dead man.  Last night I slept like a dead man being tormented by a ghost and not a good ghost.  A bad ghost.  I normally can't remember my dreams, either.  I suggest that this is either because I have a clean conscience, devoid of any tormenting ghosts, or I'm a sociopath, devoid of any sense of right and wrong with consequently no guilt or remorse about past bad behavior.  My final bout of fitful sleep concluded with a weird scenario where I was trying to sleep on a picnic table close to the ocean but a large bird of some type kept sitting on my head area.  I remember, vaguely, a duck or water fowl.  I kept squirming around and shoving at the duck but it would not be dislodged.  Finally, I woke up with a shout.  A shout!  I yelled out loud!  THAT snapped me wide-awake.  I wonder if I thought I was being smothered?  A duck!  Why didn't I just grab the duck's neck and strangle the shit out of it?  What does a duck weigh?  Like ten pounds?  I weigh 185!  And I have teeth which the duck does not have!

Clearly the message that was being sent by my subconscious is "You do not have anything to write about today so you're just wasting everyone's time."

Remembering

One of the most common experiences of traveling to other countries and experiencing other cultures is to see that the practice of honoring those who came before us is a universal one.  I'm not sure in The States that we are quite as engaged in communing with people beyond the grave.  In my Quiet Time I spend a minute imagining all my predecessors sitting around a table which is nestled in the clouds, everyone relaxed and smiling, unhurried, bemused and tolerant, not doing anything in particular beyond sitting quietly together, enjoying the minute.  It has helped me immensely over the years to lose any resentments that linger over how crappy a job they did in raising me.  They did not, of course, do a crappy job - it's more that I'm a negative son of a bitch who likes to concentrate on defects and shortcomings instead of strengths and attributes.  Moreover, as we say, no baby comes into the world with a personalized instruction manual and I was a complicated, defective model from the git-go.

In Vietnam I took a walk one morning on the raised paths that separate flooded rice paddies.  Every so often there would be a small shrine at an intersection that would have a burning candle, some food treats, fresh flowers, little gifts and mementoes inside, and the villagers would stop for a brief moment and remember their forebears.  I liked this a lot.  Not flashy or complicated, not time-consuming, not a big public display, more of a "Hey, howya doin' this morning?  I remember you.  The good you.  The best you."  For me this remembering is a very centering thing to do.  It helps my perspective on life, on how it comes and goes until eventually it all goes, and I'm just the spirit in that shrine.

Brobdingnagian

There have been many instances in my life where things have happened to me that have an outsized effect on my consciousness, my awareness of who I am and where I stand in the world.  Sometimes it has been something I've heard that really struck a chord.  Seaweed's Greatest Hits.  One that has stuck with me over the years was a period of ill health I had.  One of the reasons I do a Daily Gratitude List is that I'm not by nature grateful.  I don't know . . . maybe most people aren't.  Life can be a slog and it's easy to be wary of what shitstorm is coming next.  Anyway, one of my major blessings is overall good health and I tend to take this for granted.  We do this with a lot of things when they're going well and seem stable - spouses, families, work, financial well-being - and then when life tosses a grenade into our soup as it certainly will do we're surprised at how much we enjoyed that stability, how much it receded into a pleasant background hum.

I have begun to notice an intermittent fluttering, breathless feeling in my heart.  AFib, I think it's called.  I know this because - of course - I got on the Internet and found some websites whose main function seems to be to scare the shit out of you so you linger and maybe look at the advertisements on the side of the page and purchase some goods or services you don't need.  I don't suspect that this is anything serious and I have made a doctor's appointment but, man, when your heart is changing it's tune it's disconcerting.  One can do without many things but a beating heart is not one of them.

Too much caffeine is one of the potential causes of Afib.

SuperK: "So maybe you need to cut back on your coffee?"

Seaweed (looking at SuperK with an expression of disgust and alarm):  "If the choice is quitting coffee or dying of a major coronary?  Hmmmm.  I'll get back to you on that one."

So here's the story . . .  Again . . .  Sorry.

Several years ago I caught a nasty chest cold which took a while and some antibiotics to shake off and get well.  But my worn down body was an easy target for influenza which I think I've had maybe three times in my life and once is enough, I'll tell you.  I was good and sick for another few weeks before I gradually shook off the virus but now my body was extremely worn down so I got another standard, not-too-bad, run-of-the-mill cold.  After a few weeks I was finally virus free and found myself extremely, extremely grateful that I wasn't sick.  It brought me pause, wondering how easy it is to take my blessings for granted while blowing my challenges up to Brobdingnagian size.  (Ed Note: SuperK ran into that word in a book she was reading so I had to express my love for her by working it into the blog which she does read . . . eventually  . . .  allegedly.)

It also makes me appreciate The Serenity Prayer even more and this is a prayer I have a great deal of appreciation for on a daily basis.  The constant balancing act of trying to wait when I should wait and act when I should act.  It's amusing/alarming/frustrating/infuriating/hilarious how often fear causes me to linger when I should be moving and makes me rush headlong into something that is best left alone.  Something or the other about the wisdom to know the difference.  Something I should remember because it's important.

Something . . .  something . . .  something.

Running From Pain and Problems

"It takes twenty years to become an overnight success."

Unknown Wit

If you study the human body you'll find that many of our nerve endings have receptors that give the brain information on the various threats that we may face: extreme heat or cold: sharp, puncturing wounds; crushing force; damaging sound levels; the slow misery of an infection or disease.  We surely don't get mad at these receptors when they do their job.  "Damn, puncture-sensing receptor - that hurts.  I'd rather stay here and get stabbed repeatedly instead of running away."  These dudes are called nocioreceptors and they fall not all that neatly into the categories of heat and cold; mechanical (pinching, cutting, sharpness); and polymodal (pressure, chemical threats).  How cool is all this?  How glad are we that these things exist?  They're our friends and not our enemies.  No one likes pain but we only stick our hands in a vat of boiling sulphuric acid once, I'll tell you what, we get the message.

One habit I've gotten into - one of the benefits of trying to stay present and in the moment - is taking a close look at my feelings, pleasant or otherwise.  Fear can tell me if I'm doing something stupid and dangerous.  Anxiety can help me prepare for a difficult task.  The problem isn't the hot sulphuric acid - the problem is me sticking my hand into the hot sulfuric acid.  Don't shoot the messenger.  Your body isn't your enemy.  It's not trying to make you suffer for no reason at all - it's trying to keep you safe and alive.  Listen - don't deflect, ignore, or pretend.  That vat of acid really does hurt and trying to spin it in a positive light won't work.

It's the same with fear and anxiety.  When I was anxious after the death of my parents a grief counselor looked me in the eye and said: "What's the anxiety trying to tell you?  There's a message there!"  I was so busy trying to make it go away by ignoring it or attacking it with positive imagery that I didn't learn the lesson that I needed to learn; namely, that loss is hard and it makes you feel bad and that's okay.  Quit running!

"Until now, our lives had been largely devoted to running from pain and problems.  We fled from them as from a plague.  We never wanted to deal with the fact of suffering.  Escape via the bottle was always our solution."

Step 7 P. 74.

No One Here Gets Out Alive

"While there's nothing wrong with striving to do better, as soon as our happiness and self-approval are hinged on achieving this perfection, we are endangering our own well-being."                               The Toltecs

I have a young friend in The Fellowship who's smart, energetic, not a person who needs help doing things, preferring to make her own decisions which are often successful - until a series of circumstances happened all at once and overwhelmed her (pressure at school, her husband drinking a bit too much, an approaching AA anniversary which for some reason seems to eat at a lot or our minds, a dog sitting kerfuffle) and you lose it.  For me it was Sponsor Ken, mom, and my Dad dying in short order, finally admitting that I should undergo a lengthy, painful, and expensive process to get my neglected teeth brought into fit order, and an awareness of the aging process as I hit the age milestones of sixty, sixty-two (social security benefits begin), and sixty-five (Medicare! - health insurance for old people!).

As Jim Morrison famously said: "No one here gets out alive," a line that has become a cultural expression reminding us that mortality is universal. Depending on the context, it can be interpreted as:

• A stark statement that everyone eventually dies.
• A call to live authentically because life is finite.
• An expression of existential or philosophical reflection

I repeat that I have a tendency to call on other people when I lead a meeting.  I love the terror I see in their eyes.  I love the control!  I love seeing the minds working away: "What am I going to say if he calls on me?"  In Portland the meeting leader called on folks before opening up the meeting for anyone who wanted/needed to share in the last ten minutes.  The explanation given was that this was an attempt to keep everyone "engaged."  You want to be uncomfortable?  Try sharing when you haven't been paying attention to the topic because you're thinking about yourself.  Shit gets uncomfortable fast.

"While I love spending time with others, I also love being alone and enjoying my own company.  That's good news! Because if I didn't enjoy being with myself, that would make for a difficult life, as I am the only person who is with me all the time.  Remember, the point of all this work is to enjoy life.  It starts with the relationship you have with yourself."                                                                      The Toltecs

One Minute Here, Gone Forever

"Silence propagates itself, and the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find anything to say."

Samuel Johnson

Ahhhh, the Silent Treatment.  Is there any more satisfying way to act like a dick than to employ the4 beloved and much cherished Silent Treatment?  I'm angry but I'm not going to tell you why and even if you know why I'm not going to participate in trying to fix it.  While the Angry Response is an excellent coping tool in my estimation it pales when compared to the Silent Treatment.  I always tell SuperK: "If you're pissed at me let me know.  Don't make me guess."  I'd rather deal with it right up front.  It's the NO SNIPING rule.  If you want to throw me off a cliff please look me right in the eye and say calmly: "I'd like to throw you off a cliff."  THAT I can handle.  The guilt and fear over uncertainty is a lot worse than the quick pain of an explanation.

I was talking to the IT engineer who handled technical support in my sales area, a guy from New York City, and I was hemming and hawing about something, not getting to the point, trying to be pleasant and accommodating and in the course of things dragging out what was really a pretty simple matter when he interrupted me with: "What are you trying to say, Seaweed?  Just say it!"  In my memory I laughed out loud and here I am telling people the exact same thing today.  Don't make me guess - just tell me.

I have been thinking about the meditation which posits existence as the sky and thoughts as clouds drifting by - the sky stays, that's existence, while the clouds come and go, those are my thoughts.  Just watch them come and go.  The sky stays the same while the clouds constantly change.  I also like the analogy of watching the water flow by while sitting on the bank of a river.  Existence is the river - the river is always there, it's not changing or going anywhere - and the constantly changing water represents my thoughts.  Here one minute, gone the next.  Or maybe existence is the water and my thoughts are the river?  Or maybe existence is the bank I'm sitting on and the water is bullshit and all of a sudden I find myself a hundred yards away, crashing through thick forest and trying to figure out exactly what the fuck is going on?  "Where did the river go?" I yell.

That makes more sense.  That sounds like something I'd do.

The Brain WILL Think

"Without awareness, our minds can take on more power than we might want by completely absorbing our attention.  If we let it, the mind will constantly narrate, or commentate on, everything we do, say, see, touch, smell, taste, and hear - by explanation, comparison, and judgment.  Instead of taking an experience for what it is,  we create a story to make it fit our beliefs.  For me balance is key in making sure I use the tool instead of the tool using me."

Commentate?  Really, Toltecs?

I've always hung my hat on the idea that I am not my thoughts.  Thoughts come . . .  and thoughts go.  We think.  We have in the animal world a brain that is gargantuan.  It's an outsized outta control monster, the human brain.  It's unheard of and unparalleled.  So what do you think it's going to do?  Idle?  Inspect its own navel?  Watch old Simpsons' reruns?  No!  It's going to think!  Plan, relive, correct, fantasize, imagine, prepare, all while rewiring our memories so that what we remember corresponds to who we want to be and not necessarily who we are.  I've always been fascinated by the research that shows a common tendency for people to reimagine past events so that the memory fits today's self-image.  Somewhere deep inside the brain is telling us that the homophobic comment we made long ago never really happened because we are sure not homophobic today.   Haven't you ever listened to someone that you shared an experience with reminisce about the exact same experience you lived through while you're thinking: "WTF is that guy talking about?  That never happened."

Don't trust your brain implicitly.  It's a sneaky bastard.  It has only YOUR best interests at heart so if it has to lie, cheat, and steal to throw someone else under the bus it's going to do it.