Reviewing Reviewing Rehearsing Rehearsing

When I'm feeling especially clever I spend my time in The Past and in The Future.  In The World According to Horseface he Present is a very borrrrrring! place indeed.   Anybody can hang out in The Present.  There's nothing cool going on there.  It's full of work and bathing and listening to tedious people drone on and on, often about how uninteresting The Present is.


Review:  To view again; look at, look over, or study again; to look back on; view in retrospect.


The Past is a powerful source of painful memories.  I can inspect burned bridges, ruined relationships, and crashed careers.  I can analyze my behavior.  I can come up with something better than what I came up with it at the time, or I can worry that what I came up with was taken the wrong way.  Plenty of things to obsess over in The Past.


I can spend time looking in The Past reviewing, reviewing, reviewing . . .


Rehearse:  To perform for practice, as a play, etc.  in preparation for a formal or public performance.   (Director, anyone?)


I can also choose to mine The Future for problems waiting to happen.  Because The Future, by definition, has not yet happened, it is a rich mother lode of disaster.  How many hours of conversations have I had with people who weren't present, preparing for something that never happened?  More than one, less that a million, closer to one than to the other, can you guess which one?


I can spend time in The Future rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing . . .

Grasping

Grasping:   Greedy; eager for gain; avaricious.
Grasp:         To take hold of firmly . . . ; to take hold of eagerly or greedily; seize.


The Minor Buddhist talks a lot about the problems that bubble up when I spend too much time in grasping mode.  I think that about all of the pain that there is in my life comes about when I try to grab and hold onto things too strongly.  Grasping is a brutal concept; it implies greed and gain and power.


My impression is that I should strive to wear the world like a loose garment.  I'm in the world; I'm part of the world; but I shouldn't try to wrestle life down to the ground and pain it.  Meditation helps me here -- it allows me to watch the world flow by without judgment.  


My claw marks are on everything.

Great Displeasure

Anger:  Implies emotional agitation of no specified intensity aroused by great displeasure.


"I think I'm a little angry about this trip back to The Old City," I said to SuperK.  "What with the family and the work and the lousy weather returning and all that."
"You're not a little anything," she pointed out, pointedly.


The Book warns us many times that anger is an emotion that has a lot of grim consequences for the drunk in recovery.  There are famous phrases like "a dubious luxury of more normal men" and "the grouch and the brainstorm are not for us."  I'm not sure what a grouch is or why brainstorming leads to being pissed off but I'm not sure about very many things.  There you have it.


I don't think I hew the company line too closely when it comes to anger.  I don't interpret these phrases to mean that we shouldn't get angry, ever.  I don't think Bob and Bill were suggesting that we're going to be able to avoid anger once we get sober and then forevermore.


My opinion is that these guys are counseling caution when it comes to quick and powerful angry responses to irritating situations and people.  Counting to 10 works for many people; counting to 2,873 is very reasonable for the alcoholic.  I know my technique was to jump to a conclusion, get very, very angry very, very quickly, then launch a furious counter-strike.  After all, the best defense is a big offense.  I can't be reminded often enough that "restraint of tongue and pen" is going to pay handsome dividends for me.  I say stupid things when I'm calm and thoughtful.  When I'm angry and impulsive I'm just an idiot.


I also think that the recommendation is to make sure that anger -- a normal, unavoidable human emotion -- needs to be carefully managed.  So when I get angry I count to 2,873, biting my tongue hard enough to draw blood, then I try to deconstruct the anger.  Keeping my mouth shut helps me to minimize collateral damage so that I can take a look at why I got angry.  Usually, it's because I'm not behaving very well and I'm annoyed that I got called on my bullshit.  The important thing is that I deal with the anger so that it doesn't develop into the deadly Resentment.  That's what I need to avoid.


Resentment: taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

There Comes a Season: Turn Turn Turn

The weather is starting to turn turn turn toward the winter ahead.  This is always a tough time for me.  I'm an outside person.  I'm a big lizard, looking to bake in the sun.   I tend to experience some melancholia this time of year.  The knowledge that this happens every year and I can't do anything about it doesn't seem to help much.


I'm back to The Old City next week for work and family.  That's two reasons to be warped off center.  I'm trying to continue my long long long ballet of deception with The Evil Empire.  I'm trying to be comfortable with my questionable behavior.  I'm a master of self-justification when it suits my purposes.  Part of the difficulty this time is that I have to spend a couple of days with a co-worker who isn't aware that I've moved far far far away from my territory and wouldn't be supportive if he knew.  It's one thing to be hyper-vigilant for an hour conference call and another altogether to do it for a few days.  Eventually I have to stick my foot in my mouth.  I'm going to say: "Boy, it sure was a rainy summer" when, in fact, it was not.


"You know, you could be honest about it and just quit if it makes you feel so bad," my sponsor pointed out.
"Hello?  Hello?" I say.  "I'm having some trouble with the connection here."


And my family, oh, yes.  My mother is very very very excited to see me right up to the point when I start to explain why I can't completely mold my schedule around the several frankly odd things that she has pre-scheduled.  I never never never question the origin of my Control Freak button.  I know who installed that.


"Can't you cancel your dentist appointment?" she asked, ignoring the fact that I had to make the appointment 6 weeks ago and I'm only in town for 3 business days.  She knew when I was coming shortly after I did.


People do fit us into categories.  They're happy happy happy with us when we step obligingly into the space they've created.  Not so much when we try to go our own way.


Sometimes I don't feel so great and I don't know why.  I have to do the work to figure out what's going on.  Sometimes I find something real and sometimes I'm drifting drifting drifting off into Free Floating Anxiety Land, and that's OK, too.  We all get to be disconnected.  And sometimes I'm around people or in situations or enduring weather patterns that I can't control.  Sometimes they aren't that great, either.  It's not always my fault.


All I can do is to work on finding my place in what's going on.

Walk a Mile in My Shoes.

I love the diversity of The Program.  I have learned so much over the years because I've made friends from all walks of life.  The Book says "we are people who would not ordinarily mix."  It compares our Fellowship to the different kinds of people in a lifeboat leaving a stricken ocean liner.  A tremendous sense of camaraderie exists despite differences of class, money and education, born of the knowledge that everyone has escaped a terrible fate.


That being said I'm also glad that there are people around whose story line is similar to mine.  It's great being able to talk over a specific problem with someone who may have experience with that specific situation.  And sometimes my problems are not of the low-bottom variety --  OK, they're almost never of the low-bottom variety -- at which point it's nice to be able to talk with someone who is in similar circumstances.  That doesn't mean I can only be helped by specific drunks, just that it's comforting to talk to someone who has walked a mile in your shoes. 


For instance, if a member is having trouble with a child it would hardly be compassionate for someone with no kids to say: "Well, you should just be grateful that you're a parent."  While we should be grateful for what we have that doesn't mean it's not upsetting when a difficult situation arises.  

A Glamorous Life

Dude spoke at the meeting this morning: "I was 16 the first time I had a drink of wine.  I liked it so much that I drank as much as I could as often as I could."


"Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol.  The sensation is so elusive that while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false."
Glamour:     Magic; enchantment; magic spell or charm.
Glamorize:  To make something glamorous.


I was told growing up that alcohol and drugs weren't good for me, then I tried them.  Boy, did I disagree with that advice; I felt like I hadn't been receiving accurate information.  It felt like the adults were lying to me.  Drinking and using made the bad go bye-bye.  I vaguely sensed that what I was doing wasn't going to be good for me in the long run but I was really addicted to the relief that the alcohol and drugs provided.  The adults should have said: "This stuff is going to make you feel better in the short term but really cause problems in the long run."  I would have respected that more than "Just say no."  I would have kept drinking, of course, coming up with some other kind of excuse.
  
I need to keep getting this information.  The problem with me -- one of many -- is that I glamorize my past when it comes to drinking.  It was a real problem solver and it was cheap, easily obtainable, and fast-acting, unlike all of this %^$!! work I have to do in recovery.  

Non-Specific Prayers

One of the non-specific prayers that I offer up every morning, especially if I have something troubling going on or something confusing or, most commonly, something that I'm trying to dictate the outcome of . . . where was I?  Oh, yes, the prayer.  It's along the lines of: "Please show me the path I should take with this issue."  That sounds pretty prissy and not at all like something I would actually say.  My prayer to a Higher Power who is perfectly capable of taking any lip and attitude I can dish out and is not at all offended by my foul language is more along the lines of: "Hey, what the %$!! should I do here?"


I think the goal is to try to avoid the brick walls and to spot the tree-lined paths leading to pleasant little parks.  It's inevitable that every now and then I'm going to go nose-first into a brick wall and overlook the pleasant park.  I'm only human.  The idea today is to quit walking into the brick wall over and over again, hoping that my nose battering finally brings the thing down.  And I try to quit saying: "Hey, I don't want to go to that wuss park.  Where's the trail to the Black Sabbath concert?"


There's a Simpson's episode much beloved in the Horseface household where Homer is floating along in a canoe when he comes to a fork in the river.  One side is full of flowers and birds and rainbows and the other side looks like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.


"Hmm.  Wonder which way I should go?" Homer muses.


For instance, when we were pondering the big move from The Old City to The New City it was tempting to engage my self-locomotion and force the issue.  Instead, I tried to indicate what it was that I wanted to do but to agree to try, to the best of my ability, to listen to the soft, still voice of my conscience.  There were green lights and there were red lights and there were a hell of a lot of yellow lights.  I think the trick was to choose an outcome and head that way.  I don't believe that is an improper use of the will.  I believe we get to make choices and decisions down here, to the best of our ability, trying to listen for the occasional tap on the shoulder or box to the ear, then change direction accordingly.


When you come to a fork in the road, take it.