It's Not Them

News Flash: Alcoholics Suck at Relationships!

"But it is from our twisted relations with family, friends, and society at large that many of us have suffered the most.  The primary fact that we fail to recognize is our total inability to form a true partnership with another human being."

I'm telling you that is some no-shit straight talking.  It's not possible to misinterpret the intent of the phrase"total inability."  That is a clearly articulated sentiment even for for someone as argumentative and self-satisfied as me.

But wait!  Order now and we'll say the same thing in a slightly different way!

"We have not once (Ed. Note: Not once) sought to be one in a family, to be a friend among friends, to be a worker among workers, to be a useful member of society (Ed. Note: I can hear my dad yelling "You are totally useless!").  Always we tried to struggle to the top of the heap, or to hide beneath it.  This self-centered behavior blocked a partnership relationship with any one of those about us.  Of true brotherhood we had small comprehension." 

And, of course, nothing is ever my fault . . .   I can spot a defect in someone else at a thousand yards while ignoring a defect the size of a Buick afflicting my own personal self.  It's no wonder I have trouble in my relationships when I'm perpetually finding fault in everyone else.

"Our present anxieties and troubles we cry are caused by the behavior of other people . . .   To see how erratic emotions victimized us often took a long time.  We could perceive them quickly in others, but only slowly in ourselves."

And even if someone else is to blame . . . 

"Or if my disturbance was seemingly caused by the behavior of others, why do I lack the ability to accept conditions I cannot change?"

Why, indeed.

Productive Striving

Strive:  To try to achieve a result: to make strenuous effort; to try earnestly and persistently.

And from a slightly different perspective  . . . 
Strive:  To struggle in opposition; to be in contention or dispute; to contend.

Sounds like war, doesn't it?

Productive:  Capable of producing something, especially in abundance; yielding good or useful results; constructive.

Ah, "good," that's the troublesome word.  Too much nuance there, too little certainty.

Long, rambling talk with SuperK last night about being productive, although we hid the reality of the discussion under layers of justification.  We are both strivers in our own way - we look at the thing produced differently but the basic intent is the same: who is doing the most in the best possible way.  Who is filling dead time with stuff.

This idea of a productive use of time is so distinctly American.  Here we waste time.  We kill time.  We don't linger over something with anyone.  We don't know how to idle.  We're on to the next thing, checking our cell phones as we sprint off.

If you want to watch Sports Center for an hour . . . what the hell?  Watch Sports Center for an hour.  The world isn't going to grind to a halt.  I watched the highlights - again - from a college football game played in 2015 yesterday.

I once read the frustration a writer experienced while trying to describe what she was doing to her Type A hyper-competitive banker husband, trying to help him understand that she needed time to let her mind figure things out: "Just because you see me sitting quietly doesn't mean that I'm not doing anything."  I'm such a linear person - make a list, get to work, cross shit out, move on, relentlessly.  I can't tell you how many times I've gotten to the end of a day and realized I had no idea how the day passed - I was just careening from one successfully accomplished task to the next.  I find myself getting frustrated when something stops this progress, even if it's something pleasant.

I feel like saying to the neighbor's granddaughter the next time she runs over to see me: "Uh, I'm fucking meditating?  Could you leave me alone?  I have to accomplish this task!" instead of popping out the ear buds and enjoying her very enjoyable company for a few minutes.

I got somewhat defensive during my talk with SuperK which probably means she was successfully probing a sore spot.  It also may true that she's holding me up to a standard that - while appropriate for her - may not be a great fit for me.  It's like telling someone that they're doing it wrong if they don't like a particular album that really rocks your world.  Master of Reality comes to mind.

Productivity is in the mind of the beholder.

A scene from childhood . . . Running outside and flopping on the ground under a big elm tree in our front yard.  It's summer time, I have a few months of not going to school ahead of me, I don't have anything to do, it's really about as great as it gets for a kid, although I'm in a contest to see who in my class reads the most books over the break, a contest that I used to trounce my main rival, Sherry somebody.  I remember lying there, a breeze moving the branches around, filtered sunlight dappling my face, listening to the familiar noises of my neighborhood.

I'm not sure it's possible to be happier than I was right then.  Maybe I should spend the afternoon lying in my cactus patch listening to the palm fronds rattle . . . 

Acronyms For Everybody!

Pray:  To petition or solicit help from a supernatural or higher being; to communicate with God for any reason.

I like that "supernatural" is in the definition.  It gives praying sort of a Batman feel.  I also like the "for any reason" part.  I'm pissed.  How about that?  I can just harangue God for an hour or so?  I don't think the pastors of my church would like the "any reason" part.  It sounds pretty permissive.

In my religion we were given the acronym ACTS: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication.  Yeah, I didn't use that. My personal acronym was SHIT: scream, hit, intimidate, threaten.  Supplicate this, dude.

Some quotes for ya . . . . 

"At no time had we asked what god's will was for us; instead we had been telling him what it ought to be."

And a little later . . . but not that much later . . . which suggests that our founders knew we weren't paying attention . . . 

"We had not even prayed rightly.  We had always said 'Grant me my wishes' instead of 'Your will be done.' "

Now that we're sitting upright in our chairs, fully attuned to the lecture: "It is when we try to make our will conform with God's that we began to use it rightly.  Our whole trouble had been the misuse of willpower.  We had tried to bombard our problems with it instead of attempting to bring it into agreement with God's intention for us."

There's a great Simpson's episode where the beefy gym coach only allows the kids to play a game called Bombardment.   The game consists of the coach smashing balls into the kids with great force.  

That's how I pray.

But yet . . . 

"The minute I stopped fighting or arguing, I could begin to see and feel.  We trust infinite god rather than our finite selves.  We are in the world to play the role god assigns.  Just to the extent that we do as we think he would have us, and humbly rely on him, does he enable to match calamity with serenity."

OK, this has gotten awfully close to being too religious-ey even for me.   I am glad I got to capitalize the word SHIT.  It brings some carnal earthiness to the passages. 

Family And Such

I read this a while back and it definitely gave me some comfort.  The author is a normal, non-alcoholic guy, and he doesn't know how to deal with his family, either.  It's not just us drunks.  Apparently other people feel clueless when it comes to family.

In some ways my relationships with family members improved when I moved 2500 miles away.  And this is mostly on me - I'm not the easiest guy to sustain a long-standing and intimate relationship with.  I'm prickly.  I'm impatient.  I'm an insufferable know-it-all.

"My parents had both fled communities where family ties were strong and long, for New York City, where individuals were autonomous and self-invented.  We performed the rituals of family the way some people attend church, because it’s the right thing to do, rather than because they feel the spirit.  It worked fine until it didn’t.  Then my mother was on her own, with three sons who thought being on your own was the goal of human existence.  We weren’t opposed to family warmth; we just didn’t speak the language, and didn’t know where to learn it.  Put a gun to my head and it would never occur to me to invite my mother for a week at the beach."

Scrub Jays, Eight Year Olds, and Armenians

I've come across a lot of suggestions in my reading that being grateful is sort of a good thing.  This isn't amazing.  What is amazing is that the realization is usually stupefying, hitting me as sort of an electric shock, a jolt of recognition.  

I'm not sure I'm living on a higher plane if it surprises me, over and over, time and time again, that I should be grateful for things.

"Wow," I think.  "That's a great idea.  I should try it some day."

Seriously, I do have a Gratitude List that I ponder every morning.  It's full of big, astounding things, incredible gifts that I've been given, major things like health and a good spouse and friends and a Very Fast Car.  As with many routines, however, musing on my blessings can become a rote exercise, a practice where I'm saying the words superficially and not absorbing them deeply.  I often take these blessings for granted.

So one of the books suggested a daily, one-off, unique expression of gratitude.  I've been doing this and also forgetting to do it sometimes.  I've never been comfortable with someone, say, gushing over a beautiful sunset.  It seems emotional, superficial, too touchy-feely for me.  But ever onward and upward, right?  Quitting drinking seemed like a stupid idea a long time ago and look how that turned out.

One day I tossed a few peanuts on the ground.  This local bird - the scrub jay - bright blue, a real talker, swooped in, grabbed a nut, and went to work with Germanic purpose.  He banged the nut on the ground until the shell fractured and he could get at the seeds inside, which he then banged on the ground, eating the small shards that resulted.  After a few peanuts he grabbed an intact shell and flew off, bringing dinner to someone else, I assume.

One day the 7 year old granddaughter of our best-friend neighbors wandered over.  Like a lot of kids she doesn't know what to make of my stream-of-consciousness, non-sequitur bullshit but she always runs over and hangs out for a while.  I got a couple of big hugs.

Yesterday an appliance repairman showed up to fix my balky stove.  He had a heavy accent.  I always compliment people on their accents and then try to guess at their heritage.  Armenian.  I guessed Greek.  Was I in the game?  He didn't seem to be offended.  He did seem to be surprised that I knew so much about the Caucasus and wanted to visit the area some day.  We had a free-form, wide-ranging conversation about peoples and travel and his life.  This dude - this dude repairing my general electric gas range, speaks four languages.  Four as in one more than three.  Armenian, English, Russian, and one other that I forgot because I was so blown away at the first three.  He's pondering a class to learn Spanish.

He seemed pleased when I told him: "You should be working as a translator somewhere."

When he was wrapping up his work and stood and said to me very formally: "I like my job because I get to meet people like you."  We shook hands and off he went into the night.

Pascal? Kafka? Really?

So if you tell me to do something I won't do it.  Don't ever tell me what to do if you want me to do it.  I won't take my hand off a hot stove if you imply that it would be a good idea.

After mom and dad and Kenner died I felt the need to explore a solution, some solution, part of a solution, in a venue outside of The Program.  My recovery is not only in the rooms of recovery.  Our literature urges us to make use of all of the tools for good, right living that the world offers up: doctors, religion, psychology, philosophy, music, art, nature.  There's a ton of good shit out there.

I read books on grieving.  I read a few on depression and anxiety.  I read a book on aging with gratitude and grace that blew me away.  Now I'm reading one called: "The Art of Wasted Day" by Patricia Hampl, an American essayist.  I'm being blown away by this book as well.  It is written by a striver and is resonating with a striver like me, a dude who knows the concept of "It's Never Enough."

Life conceived—and lived—as a to-do list. This is the problem. I sense I’m not alone. Fretful, earnest, ambitious strivers—we take no comfort in existence unfurling easefully as God intended. For the worker bee, life is given over to the grim satisfaction of striking a firm line through a task accomplished.  On to the next, and the next. Check, check. Done and done.  It explains—and solves—nothing to call this workaholism.

The beauty of arriving awareness of consciousness existing for its own purpose, rippling with contentment and curiosity. One’s own idiosyncrasy reveals itself as a pleasure, without other value—but golden, amusing, integrity hard-won and now at its leisure.  Hand on heart, this life of the mind, lolling—tending to life’s real business. This latter stage of existence suggests that the ultimate task, the real to-do, is: waste your life in order to find it.  Who said that?  Or said something like that.  Jesus? Buddha? Bob Dylan? Somebody who knew. 

This particular battle between striving and serenity may be distinctly American. The struggle between toil and Real Life.  I was mistaken. The essential American word isn’t happiness. It’s pursuit.

How about just giving up? Giving up the habit of struggle.  Maybe it’s a matter of giving over.  To what?  Perhaps what an earlier age called “the life of the mind,” that phrase I fastened on to describe the sovereign self at ease, at home in the world when I decided to embrace that key occasion of sin—the daydream.  Happiness redefined as looking out the window and taking things in - not pursuing them.  Taking in whatever is out there, seeing how it beckons.  And letting it go.

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet." 

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks.

"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

Pascal

Seaweed: IN CONTROL. No Doubt About It.

Control:  Power to manage something.

Here was a lesson in giving up the myth of control.  If you believe you are in control of your life, steering it in a course of your choosing, then old age is an affront, because it is a destination you didn’t choose.  But if you think of life instead as an improvisation in response to the stream of events coming at you - that is, a "response to the world as it is" - then old age is more like another chapter in a long-running story.   The events are different, but they’re always different, and always some seem too much to bear.

I'm struck by how the fact of aging successfully seems to dovetail so closely to the best suggestions about spiritual growth.  Do the best you can.  Guide yourself in the right direction, but don't force things.  Go with the flow.  Don't mourn what you don't have.  Don't rage against the machine.  In almost every instance I could replace "old age" with "sobriety."

Here are some quotes from our Book . . . 

We know that no real alcoholic ever regains control.
He has lost control.
He wished above all things to gain self-control.
As we redouble our efforts at control, and continue to fail, our suffering becomes acute and constant.
All of us felt at times that we were regaining control, but such intervals - usually brief - were inevitably followed by still less control, which led in time to pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.
We alcoholics are men and women who have lost the ability to control our drinking.

I am NOT in control.

The tendency to sustain mixed feelings, rather than to try to resolve them, is a valuable component of elder wisdom, a recognition that life doesn’t have to be all good to be good, and also that it never will be.  Troubles are always with us, and getting rid of this one or that won’t make us happy; it’ll just move another hardship to the head of the class.  This is the distinction between “happy in spite of” and “happy if only,” the former being a benefit and the latter a handicap.

I think this is the difference between being being happy and pursuing happiness.  I think this is an example of why I should focus on what I've got and not on what I've lost or won't ever get.  I need to think: "I'm happy right now."

Remember: Your sole purpose in life may be to serve as an example for others.

"The minute I stopped fighting or arguing I could begin to see and feel."

The lesson is to find happiness not in the absence of pain and loss, but in their acceptance.  As simple as this lesson sounds, I find it one of the most daunting to live by.  Most accomplishments in my life, especially my professional life, have come from rejecting my dissatisfactions - not accepting adversity, but striving against it.

"She kept her spirits up by accepting her pains as a part of life - not barriers to happiness but accompaniments to it.  If she was going to have any contentment in her life, it was going to come with arthritis pain and her other losses.  Happiness, she said, is when “you have a nice place to live in, and you have enough money to spend and a good family.  That’s it.  And when you’re young, you fulfill your dreams.  I traveled.  The world is so wonderful, so different.  You should travel around the world and use up your money for sightseeing."

They became more selective about how they spent their time and whom they spent it with.  Mingling at cocktail parties or chatting up strangers no longer interested them.  They weren’t looking for new friends or networking for new contacts.  Another was that they became became less self-concerned, and more aware of being part of a larger whole.  Instead of being lonely, they valued having time alone for contemplation.  

Receiving is much harder than giving, but this fact is seldom recognized in mainstream American society.