Chekhov, Twain, and Amman

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out."  Anton Chekhov

We were on a cruise ship for part of our last vacation.  One day we got off the boat for a hike in a remote part of Greenland and the mosquitoes were pestilential.  Biblically so.  Actually, they were more of a flying gnat that didn't bite but just swarmed around your face, flying into your eyes and nose and ears.  I'm not sure what their end game was.  I can't imagine that flying into my ear hole was a satisfying end for this bug but their motivation remains opaque to me.  Anyway, back on the ship we chatted for a while with a couple who were also on the hike and the woman complained that none of the staff had warned us about these insects.  I was aware of the scourge of summer insects in Greenland - it's written in every travel book - and had bug spray and kind of a beekeeper's insect net that covered my head and face.  Her husband shushed her gently, reminding her that we really need to blame ourselves when things don't go the way we want.  I secretly enjoyed this.

On a similar note LSD Tom was at the meeting today.  His right leg was noticeably swollen and he was clearly limping.  I cornered him in the kitchen.  His leg is infected.  How does your thigh get infected?  From a testosterone shot.  I rolled my eyes internally.  Why this healthy, single 50 year old man needs to get a testosterone shot is beyond me but then so is a woman doubling the size of her breasts.  If that wasn't funny/sad/weird enough he told me that this was the second time he's had problems with one of those shots.  Talk about causing your own problems . . . 

"He who leads a humble life has wisdom in his heart."  Jordanian proverb

 When I'm feeling off it's usually because I'm uncomfortable with something I'm doing or with something I should be doing that I'm not doing.  Usually, I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing.  That's usually the problem with me.

I tend to think that the best people are given the gravest challenges.  The best people can handle them.  God doesn't test us with anything we aren't capable of handling.  I believe I get what I need and not necessarily what I want so I'm damned careful to be thankful when - as so often happens - I do get what I want.  It's embarrassing how often I get what I want.  I'm like a spoiled rich kid looking at my Christmas list, realizing I got everything on it plus some more stuff I wasn't greedy enough to also ask for.

"I never argue with idiots.  They drag you down to their own level and then beat you with experience."  Mark Twain

Love people for who they are and not who you want them to be.

Spirituality V Religion

 Eddie Rickenbacker was a pilot whose plane was lost over the South Pacific during WWII.  The surviving members of his crew floated for 21 days in a life raft before they were eventually rescued.  He had this to say: "The biggest lesson I learned was that if you have all the fresh water you want to drink and all the food you want to eat, you ought never to complain about anything."

I might add a warm, dry place to sleep at night and then your needs are met.  Everything else is a want.  To answer my complaining about some insignificant problem a sponsor once told me: "Seaweed, all your problems are problems of prosperity."  Shut me up, that one did.

More general suggestions about sponsorship that also apply to all of our interpersonal interactions in The Fellowship: "Good A.A.s appreciate that alcoholics have been able to achieve and maintain sobriety without any belief in a personal Higher Power.  Perhaps we might point out the distinction between the words 'spiritual' and 'religious.' "

Spiritual:  Relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.

Religious: Having a strong belief in God or Gods; devoted to God or to the powers or forces believed to govern life.

And if someone you know drinks again (as many of us do, unfortunately): "It order to make the return truly a new beginning, it may be wise at this point to avoid postmortems on the reasons for the slip."  I try to tell the relapser that I'm glad they came back - because many people don't - and that I appreciate that they were courageous enough to tell someone they had a drink - because many people are embarrassed enough about their actions that they keep this secret.

Here and Anon

 I was seeing a counselor in sincity once who remarked: "I have a couple of close friends.  That's enough.  I don't have time for a lot of friends."  She was responding some complaint I was voicing about my lack of friends or my lack of quality friends or why my friends weren't as excited that I was their friend instead of the opposite.  She said this in a positive way, too, I think.  She wasn't bemoaning the fact that she didn't have the time to hold up her end of the obligation of being a friend. While I do like having lots of acquantinances I also see the wisdom of holding them loosely.  The more people, places, and things that I collect means that the time I have to spend cultivating and maintaining these people, places, and things goes up exponentially.  My thoughts and actions on this topic has been evolving quickly lately.

One of the reasons we so value the Fourth Step and all subsequent refresher Fourth Steps and the countless inventories we take is that we're always finding new stuff.  We're always changing and if don't adapt then we squander what we have and fail to grow into the people we're meant to be.  What worked well yesterday might not be the best thing for tomorrow.

Sometimes I need to go to a meeting and sometimes I need to take care of business.  I, personally, need to be a little careful in this regard.  Sometimes I'm just filling time with my attendance.  Not a terrible thing but maybe sometimes a wasteful thing.

More from the Sponsorship pamphlet . . . which I think has really good advice for dealing with newer people in any capacity:  "It has already been pointed out that we stay sober through reliance on the  A.A. program, not on any one member.   The sponsor will  also have encouraged the newcomer to  talk to other A.A. members with longer-term sobriety.  Now might be the time for a heartfelt talk in which the sponsor again explains the importance of relying on the entire A.A. program."  The ego involved with someone who thinks that what they say about recovery, what their experience has been, applies to everyone else.  Whew.

"Sponsorship is a flexible venture, and good sponsors are themselves flexible in working with new people.  It is just as much a mistake to thrust unwanted help upon a newcomer as it is to refuse help when a newcomer asks for it.  Occasionally, it may be wise to introduce the newcomer to an A.A. member who shares more of the newcomers's background and interests."  I hear people mention that they've been "fired" by someone they sponsor.  Well, OK, I guess.  Personally, I've never been surprised when someone turns elsewhere for advice and I can say this even when I think the individual is advice shopping.  If I don't like what you're saying I can look at myself and find what's inside me that makes the advice unpalatable or I can go find someone else who says what I want to hear.

Serenity, Recovery, and Seaweed

 From this little pamphlet on Serenity . . . 

"So if we find ourselves in an apparently hopeless situation, with every avenue of escape blocked, we must not rebel.  Instead, we must realize that God has a reason for permitting it.  Most of us can look back over our lives and see how the loving hand of God has brought a happy ending to many events that seemed to be unmitigated tragedies at the time.  The trouble is that most of us think happiness consists in the fulfillment of our wants and desires, or at the very least in freedom from pain and suffering.  Actually, it consists in the serenity that comes from conforming our own will to the will of God."

And from this little book on recovery . . . 

"What difference does it make if things are left undone tonight?  Will it matter ten years from now?  Nothing is so important that we should carry tension and worry into our relaxation time.  What is important is our ability to accept the day's events by the time we're ready to sleep."

Not long ago I reread the last ten years of my personal writing journals.  Two things struck me: How rarely the things that caused me angst came to pass and how consistently I worry about the same few things, sort of a Top Ten of Personal Anxieties.  Moreover, I saw how often I felt like I shouldn't be worrying about things that clearly merited some angst.  If I hear an emergency siren and a friend or loved one isn't home I probably shouldn't panic.  If my mother and father die within a year of each other I probably should expect to be upset at some point.  

I'm trying to be grateful for all of my blessings and I'm trying to develop perspective at all my irritations and bedevilments.  In the end, in the long run, they are crashing cymbals and tinkling bells, all sound and fury, amounting to nothing when all is said and done.  One of my core principles is trying to understand that contentment consists not in getting what I want but in enjoying what I have.  As a grown-up I realize that if I'm only contented when I'm getting what I want then I'm going to be discontented most of the time.  As a grown-up I know that if I look closely enough then I can find something enjoyable - or at least beneficial and constructive - in any situation, no matter how disagreeable.

If only I look for it.

Solution Based - Problem Based - You Make the Call

 I hadn't planned on attending a meeting today but I woke up early and made the drive.  The meeting was small so I'm glad I made the effort to go.  Moreover, there were a couple of women there that I've known since I arrived in SoCal.  One of them, a flight attendant, recently moved back into the area from Texas, where she had been based, and spent ten days with her ex-husband in a blackout drunk, a continuation of the relapse she suffered in Dallas.  She did not look good.  The other woman, a chronic relapser, was recently released from the hospital where she was undergoing treatment for brain damage she suffered from her renewed drinking.  She looked worse.  I like both of these women.  Between them they've got a few days of sobriety.

The meeting was led by a woman who recently completed her year milestone.  She has a lot of professional responsibility as the executive director of a homeless shelter and is in the midst of a difficult employee situation that she's prevented from talking about due to confidentiality restrictions.  Driving home last night the idle thought crossed her mind that it sure would be relaxing to get home and have one drink; in fact, she used the charged word "cocktail" to sort of class it all up.  While it didn't seem to me that she was actually going to go through with this plan of action she was aware enough to pull off the highway for a short spell to dispel this kind of thinking.  I was struck by the two examples this morning: two problem based, one solution based.  The director looked pretty good this morning.   There was also a young woman there who has a couple of months clean and sober.  A better series of lessons to hear I can not imagine.

I often share the story of my last drink: Easter Sunday in 1987.  I drank and drank and drank and never experienced even a minute of relief, the kind of relief that the director imagined she might have.  The jumping-off point.  The instance where I realized I couldn't imagine a life with alcohol or without alcohol and, folks, that covers all the time there is.  I can remember that day with startling clarity.  It was one of the worst days of my life.

A surprising number of people believe that other people can hurt their feelings.

Acceptance is the only real source of tranquility, serenity, peace.

We can very seldom change people, though we can change ourselves.

We have free will which means we can choose a path of evil or a path of goodness.  Sometimes I wonder why man wasn't just programmed to walk a righteous path but then we'd be robots and what's the fun in that?  If you want a reward then you have to choose to do good.

Spiritual Growth

One of the complaints that I hear all the time in meetings is that the spiritual angle can be tough to swallow.  Well, no shit, I say, pointing out that about half of the first 164 pages of the Big Book are all about spirituality.  The Founders knew that spirituality was going to stick in the craw of most alcoholics.  I mean in our major religious books we have people rising from the dead and raising other people from the dead and walking on water and parting seas and shit like that.  I mean . . . c'mon.  I'm a scientist and I like things that make sense in a sequential, logical way and walking on water doesn't fit in that category.  In my Quiet Time each morning I bid my very traditionally religious godhead good day and ask for a release from any doubts I have, while mumbling obliquely that this is all some pretty weird shit.  Hearing voices coming from burning bushes where the flames aren't consuming the bush?  Sounds like what happened whenever I took some bad acid in college.

I also hear that the routine of recovery - of life - can get awfully boring from time to time.  But I know that if I don't stick to some kind of routine I might find myself in trouble.  Of course it's irritating to spend so much time on recovery and spiritual growth.  Most of the time I suck it up and power forward, certain that I'll make it back to the point where I'm enjoying both of the above.  Either that or I find myself slipping on a glacier in Greenland.  Can't imagine that every getting boring.  Can imagine that becoming a pain in the ass eventually, though.  "We have to go out on that fucking glacier again today, goddammit?"

One of my friends at the meeting today - where we talked about God and routine, could you guess? - is a woman who's a lot like me: disciplined, controlled, regimented, organized, who attended A.A. as more of a completed task, something to check off her To Do list, than as something she wanted to do.  One day she came in and told me that she was going to start attending more meetings, that she always felt good after she came.  There it is: living proof of the old adage that we attend meetings until we want to attend meetings.

Avoidance is to be Avoided

Avoidance:  Any behaviors people use to escape or distract themselves from difficult thoughts, feelings, and situations. 

And the good doctor sayeth . . .

 "For some people, trapped on a treadmill of obligation, the disadvantages of diminished functioning and physical pain are counterbalanced by the relief of lowered expectations.  This is a dangerous development in that those aspects of our characters that we incorporate into our sense of ourselves are sub-conscious and resistant to change.  And, in the case of a life constricted by anxiety, people need to muster the determination to confront their fears and stop giving in to them.  This approach manifests the cardinal rule of anxiety: Avoidance makes it worse; confrontation gradually improves it."

I was attending a grief group after my dad died and one of the monitors of the group admonished me thusly: "Pay attention to your anxiety.  There's a message there.  What is it trying to tell you?'

Man, I am a master of avoidance.  When something is painful, I just want to get the fuck away from it.  Confront it?  Pay attention to it?  That's crazy shit, man