Touchstones of the World, Unite!

"Rejoice when the going gets rough.  To rejoice in difficulty doesn't seem reasonable, because the natural way would be to give up and cry.  But we rebound from trouble faster when we turn off the tears and turn on the joy.  If we have never done it before, we need to learn how to think joy and act joyful, because the heart is listening - and it is out of the hear that all issues are settled."

I like this idea of saying good things even when you don't believe in good things.  I believe that we can change our thinking for the good when we repeat stuff that's good.  If I say I'm old, I'll feel old.  If I think I'm stupid or I can't do this or can't do that, then I'll throw the proverbial towel in the proverbial ring, and decide I can't do it.  

"Pain is the touchstone of all spiritual growth."  When I first heard this much beloved and oft quoted aphorism of A.A.  I immediately thought: "Fuck's a touchstone?"  It is "Any physical or intellectual measure by which the validity or merit of a concept can be tested."     

Hopefully those of us who have been around for a long time can pass some of this hard-earned perspective on to the newer members.  I hope that I can say something to a thirty year old or a forty year old that is going to be received more openly than when it comes from a parent, with all of the baggage and history and prejudices connected to that relationship.  And I hope that the remove from the individual that we can offer is helpful, too.  After all, if I offer a suggestion and you don't take it, then it's no skin off my ass and what do I know, anyhow?

I believe my dry wit and gentle teasing is well-received, until the times that it isn't.  This is bound to happen.  Not often, but it happens.  I believe that most of the time it makes people smile.  It makes me smile.  I believe that I've developed a fine touch with my teasing although it wasn't always this way.  Dry wit is often birthed in sarcasm, delivered with a heavy, combatitive hand, and sarcasm is "hate with a smile."  When I was younger my sarcasm was a defense mechanism and it was used to belittle and diminish people from time to time.  I give myself a pass on much of this - it's not easy growing up especially when you're tossed in with a lot of other kids growing up.  We could be cruel, all of us.

Destruction and Fatalities and Beatings, Oh, My

"You see yourself endlessly grasping for something, anything, to hold onto in the midst of all these shifting sands, and you see that there is nothing to hold onto, nothing that doesn't change.  You watch pleasurable experiences arise and fall and you see that they never last; you watch pain come uninvited and you watch yourself anxiously struggling to throw it off; you see yourself fail.  It all happens over and over while you stand back quietly and just watch it all work.  This is known as dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of life.  You see the way suffering inevitably follows in the wake of clinging, as soon as you grasp anything, pain inevitably follows."   

"This feeling of being at one with God and man, this emerging from isolation through the open and honest sharing of our terrible burden of guilt, brings us to a resting point . . . "  Step Five, 12&12

I'm always tickled when I remember that many people believe that our Twelve Steps came out of the six principles that guided the Washingonians.  I can imagine a scenario where Bill W thought: "Wow, those six principles are just perfect" and then sitting for a while before deciding to add six more.  I'm surprised he didn't get up to twenty or thirty Steps.  If one is good then a hundred is better, right?  What ever I'm dealing with I can see no problem with just doubling it.  It has got to be better.  It reminds me of the survey Central Office sent out during the Fellowship's formative years asking each of the groups to send along their membership rules and receiving like forty-two thousand rules.  I have a great complicator.  I can complicate the shit out of anything.

Here are some words found on one page of Step Six: Fatal obsession.  Destroy their lives.  Self-destruction.  Destroy himself (so that's three times with the destroying yourself).  Terrific beating administered by alcohol.  Destruction and fatalities and beatings.  Wow, why did I decide to give all of that goodness up?

A few weeks ago a young man got on the highway near where I live and drove for a bit going the wrong way before slamming head-on into another car and killing two men.  He complained of some back pain.  Well, he's going to have plenty of time to rest that back in the years he's going to spend in prison.

Ouch

"This is a riddle of our existence, the full answer to which may be only in the mind of God."

Step Six, 12&12

I've taken a lot of comfort in this sentence over the years.  It has helped me come to terms with the idea that there's suffering and pain in the world.  I, personally, would have devised a system with no free will and no suffering.  I don't get suffering.  I don't get why an all-powerful Entity would set things up so that animals kill each other for food and humans kill each other for so many reasons I couldn't list them all here without screaming in frustration.  I don't get it.  And if you don't have a belief in a Higher Power concept then why in the world did evolution and natural selection move things forward so that humans have an almost limitless capacity for cruelty?  Why did genetics make that choice?

Sometimes it be like that.  It is what it is.  And it has always been that way as far as we can tell.  Anthropologists have been uncovering examples of cruelty and violence that occurred centuries ago, millennia ago.  Why did some ruler decide five thousand years ago that sacrificing a virgin to appease a god was a good idea?  What was the thought process?  What kind of divine power would want to take the life of a young girl as a token of appreciation?  How about a Moon Pie and a bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper instead?  At least you can enjoy the snack!  Did the higher power watch the blood sacrifice and say: "Wow, I feel better now that the child had her throat slit?"  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!  You'd like to imagine the Higher Power shouting: "What the fuck are you doing? Stop that RIGHT NOW!" and just burning up the whole mess and starting over again.  If my creation did that stuff I would figured out that there must have been a whole lot of crack involved at some point.

For my sanity I don't question The System any more.  It's The System.  Divine intervention or selective evolution or random, dumbass luck, it doesn't do me any good to worry it to death.  Sickness and death and pain and loss is part of the human condition.  I'm good with that.

Where Is My Watch?

"As meditative mindfulness develops, your whole experience of life changes.  Your experience of being alive, the very sensation of being conscious, becomes lucid and precise, no longer just an unnoticed background for your preoccupations.  It becomes a thing consistently perceived.  Each passing moment stand out as itself; the moments no longer blend together in an unnoticed blur.  Nothing is glossed over or taken for granted, no experience labeled as merely ordinary.  Everything looks bright and special.  You perceive the universe as a great flowing river of experience.  Your most cherished possessions are slipping away, and so is your very life.  Yet this impermanence is no reason for grief.  You stand there transfixed."  

The italics are mine.

If I take the time to study the human mind and its connection to perception I often find that most of what I perceive as "reality" is really no more than my mind filling in the blanks in a way that it hopes will help us make sense of life, rounding out memories and experiences in a healthy way.  While the mind is impressively large for most of us it's not possible to take in all of the sensory data that is hitting our receptors without becoming overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the information.  So we fill in the blanks.  Our minds take what our senses are perceiving and blends it all together into a narrative that helps us . . . well . . . not freak out.  Our minds take our memories and reconstruct them, smoothing out the rough, unpleasant parts, so that who we are today, who we think we are today, who we want to be today, jives with our past actions.  Most of what we perceive is stored for a short time, a very short time, and then it's junked or our short term memories would be overloaded with crap.  Everything you've ever perceived isn't up there "somewhere," I can assure you of that.

I have one of those hyperactive minds that's always thinking about too many things all at once.  Sometimes I have an impressive recall of something that happened long ago but I also have a distressing and annoying ability to chuck some information that just happened.  I'm allowed to put my phone in one place and one place only.  I can't set it down somewhere randomly or I'll never find it again.  I have a drawer for my watch.  If I take it off it goes in that drawer.  SuperK and I have spent hours looking for things I've misplaced.  She never misplaces anything.  One time we looked for an hour to find my watch which I had slipped off and placed inside my show while I was stretching outside.  Had no recollection of doing that.  The hiding spot was impressive.  It took a long time to find it.

If I'm mindful, if I'm present to the best of my ability, I can remember maybe 30% of my stupid hiding places.  Maybe.  It's a stretch.

Sometimes It Be Like That

This meditation path I'm on - listening to my breath and trying to be present, grasping onto nothing, ignoring nothing, watching the stream of images flicker through my consciousness - assures me that I'm right where I need to be, in this perfect moment, making these choices and decisions with the tools I currently possess, assured that they are the right choices and decisions, assured of this because of the open channel I have with my Higher Power.  It's not always open and sometimes the message is unclear, a little garbled, kind of static-ey, and sometimes I willfully ignore the message, as clear as it may be, but I'm really trying to stay locked onto that channel.

Satan's greatest trick is making the world believe that Satan doesn't exist.  

Sometimes I get what I want and sometimes I don't get what I want and sometimes I get whomped up 'side the head with a heavy stick because I'm just not listening, but I believe I get what I need.  My path isn't always lined with winning lottery tickets.  Sometimes there's a lot of dog doo on the path.  That's how it is, here on this unpredictable and random planet.  It just goes that way.  So much of life is out of my control.  Sometimes when I'm trying to land my plane the skies are clear, there's no turbulence, no congestion in the skies, and sometimes one of my engines is on fire and there's a thing in my eye and it's raining and lightening is hitting the plane and it's all I can do to land the damn thing.

A friend in AA painted me a little rock that says "Sometimes It Be Like That."

Screw guilt!  Screw remorse!  I clean up my messes as best as I can and I move on down the road. 

God, I'm Thinking Too Much Again

I was driving to the meeting this morning, facing another possible confrontational experience with Political Cap Lady, mulling over a couple of our Traditions, all of which were born out of much pain and conflict and ill will among members chaos that at one time threatened to destroy The Fellowship.  I like the warning that often people with a lot of sobriety fall roughly into these two camps: Bleeding Deacon and Elder Statesman.  Because I've been sober a long time and I'm very regular at A.A. meetings - including lots of literature meetings where we read our books carefully - I realize I have some responsibility to stand up for what I see as "good A.A."  And because I'm totally self-righteous and self-assured and extremely Type A confident I plow forward with certainty that my own personal rectitude should be the standard that everyone else needs to live up to.  I think I've been whipsawing between these two extremes.  Should I speak up, share my own experience, strength, and hope, humbly aware that I'm not a total idiot when it comes to recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous?  Or am I making a mountain out of a molehill?  Especially since I HATE the political figure this cap is promoting.  Am I letting this color my opinion?  Would I take the same firm stand if it was someone wearing clothing promoting my side of the political spectrum?  I flatter myself that I would.  I flatter myself all of the time about everything, though, so my spidey-sense tingles when I get too smug about what's going on in my head.

Here are the facts:

1.  I talked to a lot of people with a lot of sobriety, including a few from a meeting that attracts a lot of guys who don't agree with me politically.  Almost to a person they were firm in their belief that this is not acceptable behavior.   One guy didn't think he would say anything but no one defended her behavior.

2.  I wrote to New York and - God bless 'em - they were vague and hands-off-ey as ever.  They wanted to know if it was the particular type of cap she was wearing?  Did we object to all caps?  Was the woman promoting herself as a spokesperson for A.A. as a whole or our meeting in particular?  I mean the college I went to has a fiercesome rivalry with another school.  Could I object to a meeting where everyone was wearing caps from a hated sports rival?  Some of this stuff is silly and some of it is ridiculous but it makes one think.

3.  I talked to a couple of newcomers who were oblivious to any controversy.  Part of me understands that most newcomers are oblivious to everything but also believes that just because you aren't hip to The Traditions yet doesn't mean all behavior can be tolerated.  But I get it - when I was new I was just trying not to drink one day at a time.  Violations of our Traditions were things best left to Bleeding Deacons like myself.t 

Isn't this part and parcel of A.A.?  Isn't this tendency to chaos and disorder typical of us?  Don't we make mountains out of molehills while ignoring the large anvil that is teetering just above our heads?  I think there's a passage in some religious book about pointing out the spec in someone's eye while ignoring the two by four in our own.  Locating the defects of others is our specialty.  Deconstructing our own is a task we often avoid.  "Children of Chaos" our book screams at one point.  Defiant brats, rebellious and resistant to messages we don't want to hear.  Self-centered to the extreme and immature.  That's us and that's the book talking, not me.

Now EVERYBODY'S Chiming In

Virtue:  Doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong; a disposition to choose actions that show high moral standards.

I dunno . . . I intuit that most people have a pretty good idea of right and wrong baked into their DNA.  I'm sure that some of this is socialized into us but I'm convinced we know what good behavior is and what it isn't.  "Don't be an asshole,", right?

A line from the 12 & 12 that has always stuck with me: "Prudence is a virtue that carries a high  rating."  How about the virtues of faith, hope, love, justice, solidarity, temperance, courage, and practical wisdom.  That's from the Catholic Church.  Nothing the matter with that stuff.

Here's another: "Going it alone in spiritual matters is dangerous."  Sheesh, the crap that comes out of my self-righteous mind.  It's embarrassing to share this crap sometimes.  I insist on sharing this crap with other people, though, for my own peace of mind.

The Buddhist dude: "These reactions (namely, disappointment and frustration) arise out of your own inability to get what you want, your fear of losing what you have already gained, and your habit of never being satisfied with what you have."  Step Seven in the 12 & 12: "The chief activator of our defects has been self-centered fear - primarily fear that we would lose something we already possessed, or would fail to get something we demanded."  Lockstep thinking from a Western mid-twentieth century spiritual movement and a far older moral philosophy that has its roots deep into the Far East.  Total agreement, as far as I can see.

Cherokees again: "There is a time to be bold but it takes wisdom to know when it is.  If something is worth having, it is worth waiting for, worth working toward.  But the fear of losing something before we have had a chance to make it our own can stir us to take risks that are unwise."  Is this or is this not just another interpretation of A.A.'s beloved Serenity Prayer which, of course, was penned by Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, a Christian theological ethicist long before Bill W and Dr. Bob knew each other.

It's all the same stuff.  Nobody is coming up with anything new.