Eck-wah-NIM-eh-tee

Equanimity:  (In many spiritual traditions) A balanced, stable state of mind that remains undisturbed by life's ups and downs.  It means meeting pleasure and pain, praise and blame, or success and failure without clinging to them or fighting with them.  It is an alert, caring presence and not emotional coldness.

The Eight Worldly Winds: (In Buddhist traditions) Gain and Loss.  Pleasure and Pain.  Praise and Blame.  Fame and Disrepute.  Equanimity lets a person watch these shifting conditions pass by without letting emotional storms control their actions.  

True equanimity cares deeply while staying non-reactive.  This doesn't mean doing nothing - it means creating the clear mental state needed to make wise decisions.  It's the liberating quality that  allows us to keep our hearts open and balanced, quiet and steady, in the midst of life's inevitable vagaries.  We don't scream "Foul!" when things don't go our way and we don't sit there with a self-satisfied look on our faces, nodding smugly, when we get what we want because we don't know what we want, most of the time, and even when we get it we're just going to want more.  If that's not frustrating enough sometimes when we get what we want it doesn't work out in our favor in a real meaningful way.

I'm reading a Mark Twain novella right now which is centered around a dude named Satan.  Not that Satan, who we all can agree is a pretty bad dude, but a nephew named after his uncle.   Nephew Satan is slumming around on earth, really quite dismissive of humans and their often cruel, self-centered natures, always preferring the company of animals who he believes have purity in their actions and intentions.  In the course of his wanderings he befriends three young boys and tries to teach them that all of our actions mean something in the long run, that if we get what we want that it may cause incalculable suffering later on.  As an example, he tells the boys that one of their friends is going to sneak out of the house one evening and then drown in the river while attempting unsuccessfully to save a child who was swept into the current.  The boys are bereft and ask Satan what they can do to change the course of events so that their friend stays alive.  Satan agrees to do this but only if they will allow him to show them how their friend's life will play out in this changed reality.  The friend contracts polio and lives for many years, bedridden and in pain, trapped in an iron lung and the small girl is forced into a life of prostitution when her parents are killed in a train accident.  The lesson is we are not assured that if we let our puny human minds decide the future will  improve.  It is the reminder that we need to stay present and enjoy every minute, doing the best we can to be good, decent people, certain in the knowledge that life is unspooling in a manner that we'll never be able to comprehend.

Equanimity is a profound quality of strength and evenness of mind undisturbed by emotional upheavals.  The ability to maintain an inner balance and calm, no matter what may be happening around us.  We try to strengthen our observation skills so that we may see and understand the whole situation instead of one little part.  The Pali word is upekkha which means "balance" and it refers to our ability to arrest the mind before it falls into extremes.

"When you listen to the voices in your head, do you hear words of fear and judgment and stories that cause inner conflict and struggle?  Or do you hear words of support, unconditional love, and self-acceptance?"

The Toltecs

Root Canals!

 Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment on purpose and without judgement. It is the basic human ability to be fully aware of where you are, what you are doing, and how you feel, rather than being overly reactive or overwhelmed by thoughts.

Mindfulness means maintaining a moment by moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment through a gentle, nurturing lens.  Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them.  Without believing, for instance, that there's a "right" or "wrong" way to think or feel in a given moment.  When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we're sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.  Life slows down.  I make better decisions when I'm listening for that small, still, inner voice instead of careening down the freeway at a hundred miles per hour.

This is from a Hazelden meditation book: "Today we can slow down the pace and notice the things around us."  More mindfulness.  More reminders to be present.

The Toltecs: "If I see working through the filter of 'I want to" it is because I have placed my intent in that direction; I am working willingly.  Remembering this makes all the difference in the world.  Recognize you always have a choice, and once you've made a decision, follow through without  resistance.  You don't 'have to' do anything; but do choose to do many things, for many different reasons."

I dunno.  This is one lovely intent but it's pretty tough to willingly go and have a root canal.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a conscious, voluntary decision to let go of resentment, bitterness, and anger towards someone who has hurt you.  It is aimed at personal peace and emotional healing rather than forgetting the offense or reconciling with the wrongdoer.

Forgiveness is not forgetting the event but releasing the emotional hold that it may have over you.

Forgiveness is a release of resentment and anger.

Forgiveness is the intentional and voluntary process by which one changes their feelings and attitude toward the offender and in so doing overcomes the impact of the offense, including negative emotions like resentment and a desire for vengeance.

Vengeance!  Vengeance is mine!

Forgiveness helps me.  It releases me.  I try to compare the impact of a wrong done to me with the slow, grinding pain that I endure while plotting revenge for that wrong.  It's a slaughter.  It's not close.  

Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing will annoy them more.

This is all plagiarized from brilliant thinkers and seers and sages across time.  Except for one little bit that's mine.  How hard is it to forgive and how wonderful the benefits!  That we're shocked about this is what's shocking.  How easy it is to nurse a grudge, to feed it well, keep it warm and safe while it grows from a mouse to a T-Rex.

Ozzie and Montaigne and Ralphie . . . Sitting in a Tree . . . .

Sometimes things make sense and sometimes I'm clueless.  I'm clueless more often than I'd like to be but I'm encouraged by the fact that I'm not always clueless and that some of the time the bouts of cluelessness aren't absolute.  I was lost in the wheels of confusion.  I was the guy that other people were watching and saying: "That dude has no clue."

Here's a side note: for a while when I was struggling to come to terms with the concept of a Higher Power I considered using Ozzy Osbourne.  I was vaguely aware that this wasn't a great idea but being vaguely aware of anything was a big step up from being completely clueless.  I figure I could do worse.  Here are sample lyrics which explain why he was even a candidate:

Lost in the wheels of confusion,

Spinning through valleys of tears.

Eyes full of angry delusion,

Hiding in everyday fears.

I heard these lyrics and they buried themselves deeply into my subconscious immediately.

Ironically, most of the lyrics were written by the bass player Geezer Butler who was a seriously religious kid and seriously considered entering the priesthood.  Go figure and before you judge someone in a band called Black Sabbath mayhaps you should keep an open mind.

Sometimes I have a topic which I write about and sometimes I don't.  So here I am writing about Black Sabbath in a blog ostensibly about recovery.

Okay, let's go deep:
"The height of wisdom is to take things as they  are . . . to endure what we cannot evade."
Montaigne

Lest you look down your nose at me for worshipping Ozzy Osbourne consider this quote from Montaigne, one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance.  He wrote in the 16th century which was a long time ago to be so smart.  Basically, this quote is a forerunner to The Serenity Prayer.  Have the wisdom to understand what you can do and what you cannot.  It's not always action.  Action is easier than waiting.

I once had a T-shirt that had two vultures sitting on a tree branch, one of them quipping: "Wait?  Dammit, I want to kill something."

"What must I do is all that concerns me - not what people think.  It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after our own - but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now Ralphie was writing in the 20th century and so was Ozzy and Geezer so there's that.  Ralphie has as a core philosophy that the natural world was a living, spiritual canvas where God, humans, and the universe were deeply unified.  How cool is that shit?  I tell people all the time that if you're having trouble establishing your own personal Higher Power connection go outside in as quiet a place as you can manage and look around you, have a listen, because there's a lot going on and much of it is pretty cool.

"I greet the ups and downs of life's journey with unconditional love for myself and the people in my life by understanding that I am only truly alive in the present moment:  the future is a projection that does not exist."

The Toltecs

Error . . . . Uhhhhh . . . . One Day at a Time!

Negative Seaweed

"I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's attitude, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father."

Jules Feiffer

Negativity Bias: The human tendency to give more attention, weight, and value to negative words, experiences, and information than to positive ones of the same level.  They're more psychologically intense.  If you eat a good pear - it's delicious! - but if you eat a bad piece of meat - you're dead!

Starting out with a bad attitude, a suspicious one.

Tomorrow I have a cardiologist appointment in the morning and a dentist appointment in the afternoon.  I'm feeling some negativity here.  And I'm swimming before the appointments which doesn't count as a positive experience.

Luckily, we are not our thoughts.

I'm Listening . . . .

The awesome power of bouncing ideas off of another person, maybe someone you don't always agree with or with someone that you definitely disagree with.  Just listening to what someone with a different viewpoint has to say is an example of how I can practice extending grace.  It's important to have these exchanges of ideas.  Sometimes someone else has a better approach than me.  I have to remember that I thought a life of drug and alcohol use was a good - was the only solution to my angst and depression - when all it did was worsen the symptoms without addressing the root causes.  We need each other and we need our Higher Power to grow.  Talking back and forth sharpens and challenges each person's faith.

I've been edgy the last many days.  Hey, it happens.  Lean into the edgy.  Look at the edgy.  What is the lesson the edgy is trying to teach me?  My struggles occur when I try to get what I just think is the cause of the edginess into a chokehold and wrestle it to the ground, subdue the edgy.  I find my discomfort is heightened when I'm "off" somehow and don't exactly know why and, when this happens, little, minor upsets take on gigantic proportions.   I need to remember that an elephant is a mouse built to an alcoholic's specifications.  I am a certified Master Explosives Expert when it comes to taking something small and making a big explosion.

Originally the A.A. Program was built around Six Steps - not Twelve - but Bill, the Master Complicator had to double the total and I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just that Twelve is more than Six.  A lot more.  Twice as many.  Some of us occasionally simplify recovery to Three salient points:  Find God, clean house, help others.

My minister friend: "One result of the genuine bedrock Christian principle that all are welcome and all are forgivable, redeemable, is that it makes me more accepting of people who I once sneered at.  (Ed. Note: Good word, sneer is.  Sneer: A look, smile, or remark that shows scorn, contempt, or lack of respect.)  (My friend veers religious here, maybe more religious than I'm comfortable with but he's a minister for chrissake . . . )  "Christ showed me, made it ok for me to admit I'm as messed up as anybody, one of the most freeing feelings one can have .  . . not having to pretend to be so perfect or so normal, and this made me 100% more comfortable in my own skin."

How incredibly important it is to learn the skill of listening!  I had very little grasp of the concept of listening to someone else because I was so consumed with talking, with making sure I was getting my point across, I was being heard, that you understood me.  How many times have I heard a story I've heard once or twice or many times before.  Most people just want to be heard.  Most people figure things out on their own and the act of someone listening while they talk things out is all that's necessary.  I used to think they wanted my advice, they wanted me to tell them what to do, to solve their problems, this dude who needed a haircut and was obviously half-drunk and fully-high, THAT'S the dude who's got all the answers.  Sheesh.  The ego!  I have been cleaning out and organizing some old photos and occasionally I'll come across one of me where the image is so alarming I'll let out a yelp.

More Damn Grace

I think about meditation a lot.  I practice regularly.  I suck at it.  I have no idea how to do it effectively or how it's supposed to look.  And that's okay.  That is exactly what meditation is, sort of a clueless wandering awareness.  To me an apt analogy would be beginning to lift weights or to train for a marathon.  The important step is the first one - take a light weight and lift it or strap on a pair of running shoes that cost way more than is necessary for your first run.  There won't be any awareness of having taken a step toward a goal as you wheeze your way along, barely making it around the block, but without that initial gasping and choking for oxygen you sure as shit aren't going to get yourself in shape for a marathon.  I know in my personal meditation practice what has happened is that I find that I'm much calmer, much more present as I move through my day.  I'm not really aware of this calmness on a breath to breath basis but I know that life seems slower, more manageable, less alarming as the result of the meditation.  I don't jump to wild conclusions and act rashly - or as rashly, at least - as I used to.  People don't piss me off to the same degree.  When something pleasant happens I'm present enough to enjoy it and when something unpleasant happens, some pain or noxious stimuli or unwelcome encounter, I'm usually fine with it, not following it through to some wild, implausible conclusion.  "Eh, whatever" is a typical response.

Because I'm an Analogy Guy and because some of the teachers that I follow thrive on analogies, trying to give our tiny, rational minds some insight on how to approach meditation, I enjoy the imagery of little things changing while big things remain impermanent.  Sitting by a river and watching the constantly changing flow of water while noticing that the river is still a river - the water changes but the river endures.  Or watching clouds drifting across the sky, here for a moment and then gone, but the sky isn't going anywhere.  Lost in my thinking I'm drifting along through the clouds but then I burst through into the clear sky, into the sunshine, and voila! the sky is still there!  The clouds - my thoughts - are changing and intruding, as they should and they always have and they always will - but the sky - my awareness - will always be with me.

I talked to my old, dear friend yesterday - a retired banker and a retired pastor and how about the discord in that imagery? - about prayer and meditation.  It was so much fun to bounce ideas off of each other, his religious practice and my secular practice based on the non-traditional way that is Alcoholics Anonymous, and to see how much continuity there is between the two efforts, both of us, I think, striving to get to the same place, a place of love and understanding and perspective.  We talked about sweet, sweet grace and while I can get my dander ruffled a bit when I hear someone emphasize grace as a gift that an all-powerful God doles out I also listened as he emphasized how important it is to grant ourselves grace.  How many times I've listened to new people beating the shit out of themselves while trying to urge them to give their own damn self a break.

Gotta tell you that it was deeply, deeply satisfying to bounce these huge concepts off of another person - love and grace and the nature of God - not always agreeing but listening and pondering and finding many more points of agreement than of disagreement.  I'm quite taken with the imagery of water flowing down a river - the river doesn't change even though the water is constantly changing or watching clouds float by . . . the clouds move along but the sky is still there, is always there.

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!