Calamity

 Calamity:  The distress that results from a great disaster.

"We know this because we see monotony, pain, and even calamity turned to good use by those who keep trying to practice A.A.'s Twelve Steps.   Just to the extent that we do as we think He would have us, and humbly rely on Him, does He enable us to match calamity with serenity."

I've had like four calamities in my life - and none in the last 35 years - but, to hear me talk, you'd think I was under a constant mortal threat.

This whole idea of being hard on myself . . . Where does this come from?  Why can't alcoholics give themselves a break?  When I was physically sober but not yet emotionally sober I would often leave a sales call - a sales call where I SOLD SOMETHING - and sit in my car, feeling bad about myself.  I didn't sell more things or a more expensive thing or meet more people to sell more expensive things to.  This is too much.  This is a joyless existence.  It's wonderful to be motivated, another altogether to be compulsive about it.

Dude talked this morning about suffering through some growing pains.  He's maybe four years sober.  I've been at this for 35 years and I'm still suffering through growing pains.

Another dude talked about his coworkers chiding him for being a little intense.  If this guy reduces his intensity 90% he may get to a little intense.  He's a long, long way from a little intense.

I asked a guy before the meeting started today if he lived in our town.  He paused.  "That's an interesting question," he replied.  Only in A.A.  "Where do you live" is not a trick question.  You should have a quick response to that one.

"God takes our efforts for good and blesses them.  God needs our efforts.  Our efforts are necessary.  We cannot merely relax and drift with the tide.  When difficulties come, our efforts are needed to surmount them.  But God directs our efforts into the right channels and God's power is necessary to help us choose the right."

Constitutionally Unable

 "Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves.  There are such unfortunates.  They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way."

Constitutionally: In respect to mental or emotional makeup.

This phrase, found in Chapter 5 "How It Works," has always made me a little nervous.  I think sometimes it's an excuse offered by people who aren't doing the work to get and stay sober.  I think most people who don't stay sober aren't doing the work; through stubbornness and willful ignorance.  I don't think there are too many people who are so damaged internally that they can't work The Steps.  I think most people just don't do the work.  It's hard - I get it.  But it's not that hard and it's not as hard as you think and there are countless other folks who have had it worse than you and still managed to do the deal.  So get to work and quit feeding us bullshit.

A few nights ago a friend of mine from A.A. was struck by a car crossing a busy road at night and at an unmarked crosswalk.  His injuries were severe.  He was declared brain dead and died shortly after his family removed him from life support.  He leaves two sons - one in his 20s, one still an infant.  He had drifted away from The Program and back into addiction the last few years.  He was a profoundly damaged man, having spent 15 years in a mental institution when he was a kid.  I don't know whether he had finally had enough and just walked into heavy traffic or if he was high and drunk and didn't know what he was doing or both of those or neither.  I guess it doesn't matter at this point.  He was a gentle soul, much loved in life who will be sorely missed now.

This is constitutionally unable.  This qualifies.

Malevolence

 Big Book story today.  The jist of the story was that the protagonist never felt comfortable in his own skin, never having a feeling of belonging until he entered Alcoholics Anonymous.  This is something that is very common among alcoholics, that feeling of apartness, of not understanding how anything worked.  Everyone I ran into seemed so comfortable in their own skins and I felt like my skeleton was trying to burst violently out of my body and run away.

I process alcohol differently than most people.

God speaks to me through you guys.  I have never had God speak to me directly.  I don't know what God's voice sounds like.  I did, however, hear voices from time to time when I got the right cocktail of drugs and alcohol working real good.  And I know what SuperK's voice sounds like.  She's sort of a minor god in our household.  I don't believe she's the only God but she's godlike.

Malevolence:  Having or displaying ill will; wishing harm on others; having an evil or harmful influence.

A woman shared this morning about joining the Benevolence Committee at her church in an attempt to be of service.  I wonder if there's a Malevolence Committee that meets down in the boiler room?  Real secretive group.  Hard to join.  Harder to leave.  Everyone's dressed in black and everyone's pissed.  I'd be interested in that group.

And Malevolence would be an excellent name for a hard rock band.

The leader shared about being in the throes of a general life funk; one of those times where his serenity is thin and his ire is ascendant.  The advice he keeps getting is: Take it easy.  We're human.  We're not always going to feel great.  Deal with it.  It'll pass.  He's right around five or six years sober and my experience in A.A. is that lots of people get irritable at that point.  The easy gains have been made; the heavy god-sense is still being developed; and the day to day recovery work seems repetitive and onerous.  

You're Perfect

I read an opinion piece from a woman who was reflecting on her personal relationships and how they've changed during the relative isolation from other people that we've all had to endure during the pandemic and how these relationships are going to look as society reopens.  Like me this woman has a fairly introverted personality, preferring time alone or with a small group of friends and family instead of joining in larger, more raucous events, so she hasn't been as crippled by her more isolated than normal pandemic circumstances.  Her point - backed by many psychologists - is that most of us have the time and capacity for a handful of really deep relationships.  These relationships require maintenance and for most of us we don't have the time or the interest in doing the work to keep a larger group of people very close and intense.  She felt some freedom in not having to engage other parents from her children's school or to chit chat with the group of people who work in marketing on the next floor down.  And that this is OK.  This is OK.  I've learned to manage my relationships a lot more efficiently in A.A., maintaining the important ones and giving my self a break for not maintaining the less important ones.

I will note that for most of us in Alcoholics Anonymous we are in the position to enjoy the embarrassing riches of many deep relationships.  I keep a list of mine and there's like forty people on it.  Forty people!  Some of them I'm in contact with almost daily; some I engage weekly; and the rest may lay fallow for weeks or months at a time but when we next speak it's like putting on an old velvet glove.  It's as if we were having a conversation and I had to excuse myself to poop and when I return we just continue the conversation, ignoring the fact that I was gone too long to pretend that I just had to pee.  Everyone knew I was pooping.

This is a blessing.  The friends, not the pooping, although that's a blessing, too.  Probably a bigger blessing at my age.  If someone said I had to choose between a life as a hermit, with no friends, or taking a good poop first thing every morning I'd have to get back to them on that one.

Anyway, the point isn't an analysis of my bowel movements but rather this reminder that we all need to enjoy a comfortable, relaxed, understanding relationship with ourselves before we re-engage other people.  If you cherish your time alone or you need to be in a crowd all the time or - more likely - somewhere in between, it's all okay.  You're fine.  You're perfect.  Go with it and go with it guilt free.

Me. At the Center of the Universe.

 Easy Does It.

"Alcoholics always do everything to excess.  They drink too much.  They have too many resentments.  They hurt themselves physically and mentally by too much of everything.  So when they come into A.A. they have to learn to take it easy.

Take it easy?  Take it easy?  Tell me more about this concept, oh, master.

A.A. teaches us to take it easy.  We learn how to relax and to stop worrying abut the past or the future, to give up our resentments and hates and tempers, to stop being critical of people, and to try to help them instead.  So in the time that's left to me to live , I'm going to try to take it easy, to relax and not to worry, to try to be helpful to others and to trust God."

This is some wild shit.

"I must overcome myself before I can truly forgive other people for injuries done to me.  The very thought of wrongs means that my self is in the foreground.  Since the self cannot forgive, I must overcome my selfishness.  I must cease trying to forgive those who fretted or wronged me.  It is a mistake for me even to think about these injuries.  I must aim at overcoming myself in my daily life and then I will find there is nothing in me that remembers injury, because the only thing injured, my selfishness, is gone."

Sometimes the stuff in the Hazelden "Twenty Four Hours a Day" book gets a little too religious for me.  But then again I'm usually looking for things to object to so when I chill out and lay back I learn to see all of it from a different perspective.  I don't have a totally clear understanding of this metaphysical paragraph but I get the jist of it - I'm so worried about myself that I place everyone in the world into a category with me at the center.  It just isn't about me.  If I think you hurt me somehow then I'm looking at the situation from my perspective.  

I ask that I may hold no resentments.  I pray that my mind may be washed clean of all past hates and fears.

Immediate Cognition

 Instinct:  An intuitive reaction not based on rational conscious thought.

Rational, conscious thought.  Hmmm.  I like that.

Intuition: Immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes.

There are so many good hard rock band names here I hardly know where to start but Immediate Cognition is going to be hard to beat.  It sounds like something you'd hear on an old NASA tape as a rocket to the moon reached ignition: "We have immediate cognition."

Reading from Step Four in the 12 & 12 today produced these gems in the first three pages of the Step:

Instincts on Rampage.

Collision of Instincts.

Misdirected Instinct.

"Every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably on others . . . "

Just rack up those band names.  I mean . . . Instincts on Rampage?  Are you kidding me.  That group would have like five lead guitarists.  If you had a Finnish Death Metal festival in an abandoned nuclear waste cave 2 miles underground you could do worse than leading off with Instincts on Rampage and then having Collision of Instincts and Misdirected Instinct follow them wham, bam, thank you, ma'am.  

Whenever I read about the alcoholic and his or her instincts I'm always struck by the tension between these instincts that all of us have - for sex, money, and prestige - and the overwrought application of these instincts in the average active alcoholic.  It's not that the instincts are bad but that we take them out to the Nth degree and we do it on both sides of the fucking degree.  We hoard money or we waste it.  We act like sluts and then we act like monks.  It's never in between with us.  Reading this Step always reminds me that when I came into A.A. I felt like I didn't have the basic tool kit for life that most of you seemed to possess.  I didn't get it.  I didn't get anything.  I was totally lost.

Well, that's what this literature is for.  It's the toolkit.  It contains the instructions.

Eternal Thought

 All material things, the universe, the world, even our bodies, may be Eternal Thought expressed in time and space.  The more the physicists and astronomers reduce matter, the more it becomes a mathematical formula, which is thought.  In the final analysis, matter is thought.  When Eternal thought expresses itself within the framework of space and time, it becomes matter.  Our thoughts, within the box of space and time, cannot know anything first hand, except material things.  But we can deduce that outside the box of space and time is Eternal Thought, which we can call God.