Today

"Today I am not going to think about what I have to do.  I'm just going to do it, hoping that's what my fate is.  If I have any problems that emerge I'm going to leave them alone for now, let time work on them.  I'm not going to dwell on anything that's problematic.  I'm going to try to leave them alone and see if as time goes along they straighten out all by themselves.  I can't deal with this stuff by myself so you, god, now it's your job.  You work on it and I'll do something else.  And usually god takes care of it.

Trust.  That's what I advise to anyone who asks.  You have to trust your higher power."  Excerpt from an interview with a 92 year old man.

It's apparent that for some of us age does increase our wisdom.  I'd like to have half of what that guy has.  Maybe the next 30 years will give it to me . . . if I work at it.

Serene:  Calm, peaceful, and untroubled; tranquil.
Agitated:  Angry, annoyed, bothered, or worked up; violently or chaotically moving around.

Serene Stevie?  Or Agitated Bookman?  Which is it?  Which is it going to be?

Another one of those weird stressors we find in Alcoholics Anonymous is the conflict between taking the Long View while staying In The Moment.  When I need to have some patience I flounder around in whatever current discomfort is bedeviling me and when I need to take some action I often take approximately zero action.

That goddam Serenity Prayer.  That goddam third phrase: "The wisdom to know the difference."  Am I agitating myself when I should be patient or am I fearful of taking the action I need to take?  Huh?  Huh, dude?

Givers and Takers

Give:  To present voluntarily and without expecting compensation.  

Ouch.  WTF?  Yowser.  

Take:  To get into one's hands, possession or control, with or without force.

Seventh month so we'll be studying the Seventh Tradition at our Step meeting.  Giving money to be self-supporting assures our independence from outside organizations.  We pay our rent so no church or other group can tell us what to do because we're paying the freight.  

I like that our Steps (our personal directions) suggest that we're going to be happiest when we're giving freely of ourselves, of our experience, strength, and hope, and our Traditions (our collective directions) suggest we should open up our wallets just a little so The Program can exist.

All of this giving bullshit is still mostly counter-intuitive to me.  I still mostly don't get it intellectually.  I think: "Wait a minute - I'm going to give you something and you're not going to give me anything back?  That means you're the winner and I'm the loser."  (Ed. Note: I hate being the loser.  The whole world view of the Type A is to be the winner.)

A huge spiritual principle: a life lived in service to others is a deeply satisfying life.  A life lived in pursuit of one's own interests is hollow, shallow, meaningless.  This basic principle is found in every religion and philosophy and spiritual practice that has come into existence with any staying power at all.  Look around you - are the people with the most stuff the happiest?  I went to this really fancy high school with a lot of really rich people and they weren't any happier than the people who lived on my blue collar street.

I always have to bring out the coffee story when I think of giving . . . I was bouncing in and out of The Program, showing up late, leaving early, not talking to anyone, not staying sober, when a guy who saw what I was doing suggested I take the coffee commitment for a month.

"I don't drink coffee in the evening," I said with a straight face.  An oblivious straight face.  I wasn't trying to be witty or snide - I truly didn't understand his point.  

I was lucky that the dude was kind.

"Well, maybe you could make the coffee for the people who drink it in the evening.  So they can visit before the meeting," he said.

Oh.  So I took the commitment.  I was terrified, of course, unaware that as long as the coffee was hot and strong and present it would be OK.  And, of course, getting there early to make the coffee and staying late to clean up forced me to start . . . you know . . . talking to other people.  And the resentments I developed when I wasn't commended about how good the coffee was or thanked for swabbing out the disgusting coffee pot helped me learn about the principle of selfless giving.  I was doing something nice for someone else with no expectation of a reward.

I was Giving.

The Terrible Bills

I joke around with a few friends about what terrible people we are.  This is fun and enjoyable . . . as long as we don't take ourselves too seriously.  Mostly we don't.  Mostly this is smokescreen we use to blow off some steam and, boy, is THAT a mixed metaphor.  I have smoke and steam - maybe I should get some freezing drizzle in there.

Case in point: two ancient buddies, Suburban Bill and Farmer Bill, made an effort to say positive, encouraging things to a young guy who stayed on to chat with us after yesterday's Zoom meeting.  I've known him casually since he got sober - he's a nice guy, bright, but I suspect he may have a touch of autism or other cognitive disability so he can be tough to engage with.  There I was with an opportunity to chat face to face with two of my oldest friends - and I hadn't seen Farmer for four or five years - and I found myself slightly irritated that the kid hung around, sort of gumming up the conversation.  I wanted to trade old stories, not make an effort to include an outsider.

We joke about being terrible people haters but then our true nature, our kind nature comes out.   So when these people tell a story about how awful they are I temper it with the acts of kindness I see them commit.  Not missing the opportunity, of course, to pile on about what terrible people they are.

Love you, brothers and sisters.  Keep fighting the good fight.  It's worth it.

Serve, Redux

Redux:  Redone, restored, brought back, or revisited.

Grief:  Denial - Anger - Bargaining - Depression - Acceptance.

I think I'm back to being pissed off about the pandemic.  It seemed to me - with good leadership and a reverence for science - that we could have been past the worst of the crisis instead of on a vicious upswing.  The experience of other 1st World countries with engaged leaders and respect for scientific facts confirm this.  The things I like to do - travel on airplanes, attend theater and live music, go to art museums, scarf down ethnic dining - are severely curtailed or gone and I believe I'm blaming others for this.  Unfortunately, I'm sort of right, too, which is really fueling my resentment machine.

The vaccine is the key.

OK, that was a pissy rant I needed to get off my chest - now back to service.  I have to laugh at myself when I imagine what being of service entails.  My reveries usually end up with something grandiose - bringing a drug addict back from the brink of death, wowing a large group with a brilliant lead, guiding a group with wisdom and skill, and other things I've never done.

I start each day with a number of affirmations.  One important one is that I be shown how to be of service to someone.  I leave this deliberately vague.  I figure that god doesn't need me to tell him what I think he needs me to do, or something.  The results usually surprise me.

SuperK and I have a mutual friend who has been sober a long time.  She's a bit of a disorganized hoarder and she gets flustered rather easily.  She was having trouble filling out her unemployment forms and asked me if I could give her a hand.  We connected on Zoom where I could see she was distracted and nervous, shuffling papers, looking at her phone and at her computer screen, while I asked some questions I thought might help move things along, but all I was doing was adding to her frustration.  I realized I just needed to sit there quietly while she figured things out.  This added to my frustration because my good, linear, logical German brain wanted to take solid, logical steps to a successful conclusion.  I forget that people like to figure out things on their own.  We came up with three or four things she might do in an increasing level of difficulty.  She was very, very, incredibly grateful.

I saw her on a meeting the next day.  She had done the easiest of the options and I could clearly see she was much, much more relaxed.  This was, of course, something she come have easily thought of all by herself - indeed, she had mentioned it during our talk.  She didn't need me to solve shit - she needed a patient friend to hold her virtual hand while she figured out what to do.  This step may work and may not.   She knows that if it doesn't she/we can move on to another potential solution.

That was it.  Sit patiently (or sort of patiently) and provide moral support.

Serve

Serve:  To be useful; to meet the needs of.

Boy, these definitions can be killers.  I blow most concepts out of all proportion.  What does it mean to be of service?  Apparently to be useful.

One of my morning affirmations is a simple "Show me how I can be of service to someone else."  I no longer try to be of service in a specific way (usually in a way that I think is best but almost never is) and I have long ago given up any pretense of dramatic service.

Here are some useful things: forks, door knobs, pants (with a belt), and my toothbrush.  These are not very dramatic but my day would suck without them.  I want to be of service in a Ferrari way - a red Ferrari - even though my fork-like service is what is helpful to the most people.

If I go to a meeting and try to have the Best Share of the Day I come off like a pompous asshole.  If I stand outside the meeting and welcome everyone who shows up - especially people I don't recognize - then I'm fork-like.  A friend of mine who recently died of cancer once commented on my anniversary - in front of the group - that "Seaweed was the first person who welcomed me to the meeting."  That was the best compliment he could have paid me.  He didn't say I was wise or profound or insightful - he said I shook his hand at his first meeting.

Michelangelo

I went to a meeting for a while in a Close Maximum Security prison in OH.  The inmates had been convicted for terrible crimes but weren't judged to be security risks - there weren't any gangs, for instance.  The first time I drove up to the prison I was terrified.  The meeting room was located on the other side of the prison complex so we had to make a long walk past a lot of convicts to get there, which was intimidating as hell.  The guys in the meeting looked tough and because it wasn't a Maximum Security institution there were no guards in the room - this meant I went from terrified to scared shitless.  So to make matters worse I put on my best Bad Ass act.  This was pointless and ridiculous - I was clearly a skinny wimp from the suburbs and I didn't fool anyone.  I still cringe today thinking about it.

My goal today is to be who I am.  I don't mean to suggest that I don't have any work left on the person you would see in front of you if you could see me which you can't - I mean to suggest that I have a personality - a product of my upbringing and my internal wiring - that would be really hard to change.  People who know me understand that the way I behave around them is the way I behave with strangers and with my family and with  myself, mumbling a brilliant monologue as I sit in my easy chair, talking to people I see in my mind but who aren't really there.

If I be myself then I make real friends, form real relationships.  Sometimes the areas of my personality that cause me the most emotional grief are also the areas that allow me to succeed and achieve, so I generally go with what I got.  I think that when I first came to Alcoholics Anonymous I was buried under a thick layer of cement and clay and dried bullshit.  The Program didn't go get a new block of marble and start from scratch - it carve away the gunk on top to get at what was underneath.

Michelangelo, I've heard, didn't create a statue out of a piece of marble - he released the figure that was already there.

Here, God

Meditation:  A devotional exercise of, or leading to contemplation.
Prayer:         A practice of communicating with one's God.

For many years I attended a Twelve Step men's retreat at a Catholic retreat center.  The leader was always a Jesuit priest who in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction (good proof of the fact that a strong belief in a god isn't enough for some of us).  I was resistant at first, skeptical that a solid retreat could arise in such a religious setting and led by such a religious figure.  A lot of the time I find too many "Thou Shalt Nots" and "Thou Shalt Even Though Thou Doesn't Want Tos" in organized religion.  But because I've come to believe that I no longer know everything I signed up, showed up,  and had a blast.  While the Jesuits - the bad boys of the Catholic faith - had some capital with me they really made it about alcoholism.

Anyway, one of the retreat masters was working through the Steps when he took a long pause at Step Eleven.  Prayer and meditation doesn't come naturally to a lot of alcoholics.  We find prayer too formulaic and objectionable, too many rules and regulations,  and nobody knows what the hell is going on with meditation.  Are we supposed to stop thinking or stop trying to control our thinking?  Aware of our surroundings or off in another world?  I have no idea most of the time.  Prayer feels like being in a car that is stuck on a short stretch of a dead end street and meditation feels like being in a car with no steering wheel going 150 MPH.

Practical:  Being likely to be effective and applicable to a real situation; able to be put to use.

Here were a few of his suggestions, none of which I find weird or indistinct or theoretical:

Spend some time in nature.  Why, he asked, do you think the monks built their monasteries on mountaintops or in the desert or on cliffs overlooking the oceans?

Go look at some art.  Do you think Michelangelo was just winging it, doing that without some help from something else?

Put on your headphones and listen to some music.  Really listen to it.  Do you think Beethoven, still composing symphonies when he was totally deaf, was on his own?

Read a book.  Read the BIG Book, for god's sake.  Do you think Bill and Bob were smart enough to write those instructions without some inspiration?

Here, God.  Heeeerrrre, Boy.