Lost in the Fog

I am not my thoughts.  The idea is to be aware of them and watch them arise and subside without judgement or criticism.  The idea is to look at them with curiosity but no attachment.  They're just thoughts!  Electrical impulses between neurons!  Or something!  Am I aware or am I lost in the fog?

Without awareness my attachments and history coerce me into taking actions that conform to the belief systems of other people.  I don't like other people so why would I try to conform to their belief systems!  This isn't free will at all.  What I've done is to give up my personal freedom in order to maintain ideas that others planted in me long ago.  I traded in who I really am for what I think you think I should be. You're probably an idiot!  No offense but most people are idiots!  I'M an idiot!  This transference can be particularly troublesome when I'm dealing with other people because I'm not really seeing who they are today but rather projecting an identity on them that's outdated and based on our shared past.   

Then there's my contrarian nature.  Even when I have good intentions doing the opposite simply for the sake of being different isn't free will.  Here I'm letting the opposite choice create my identity.  To put it bluntly - I'm still allowing you to define who I am.

Instead of being tied to an automatic decision or its opposite, awareness allows me to be conscious of all the possibilities that are available.  The more I practice awareness the less automatic my choices and judgements will be.  The more I will be me.

The simple act of pausing before making a decision or taking an action, thinking about what I really want in a situation versus what may be an automatic choice, is the first step in breaking the cycle of the automatic.

To My Mineral Ancestors

 I like nature.  I find a great deal of peace when I'm connecting with natural things.  Much of the time this is as simple and common as listening - with my eyes closed - to the birds in the orange trees surrounding my little backyard patio or the waves susurring on the beach.  These noises help me relax and connect.  They allow me to focus on something besides my own deranged thoughts.

I was fortunate to be able to take a trip that plopped me in Antarctica.  If you want to feel small and young and transient, a mote of dust in a scirocco, one breath in ten thousand years worth of breaths, go to the Antarctic.  The continent of Antarctica is the driest desert on earth - the Sahara, the Great Outback, the Mojave all get more precipitation than Antarctica.  While this is mind-blogging in its own right what totally blew my mind was seeing ice that was miles thick.  I still cannot intellectually conceptualize how ten miles of ice can form in a frozen desert.  And all of it is atop rock that has been there for millions of years.  Sometimes I felt like the environment was just going to subsume me.  A "You useless speck of organica - get thee away" kind of thing.

There was a scholar on board - an anthropologist - who spoke for a bit about animism, likely the most ancient spiritual pursuit on earth and one found in many disparate indigenous cultures.  This is, as I understand it, the attribution of a life force to all things that exist, not just living things like fauna and flora.  It's less a structured religion and more a fundamental worldview that everything possesses a spiritual essence.  I spoke with him after the talk and he admitted to struggling with the idea that rocks have a life force but he was giving it a go. 

And then there's this: ice is a mineral.

I think I am going to become an animist.  Maybe a Christian animist and my mother is howling from the grave on that one.  It's easier for me to think that a bit of me is going to be absorbed into the natural world - trees and plants and animals - than to imagine that the rocks outside my front window are having a conversation about the weather.  No matter and more to come on that one but the idea that the world, that life, is very, very big and that I am very, very insignificant was presented to me in technicolor down there in Antarctica.  It was so big that the expedition staff would point out that the mountain in front of me was ten thousand feet high and not the few thousand feet that my mind was estimating.  It was so big and the terrain was so featureless that I lost all perspective.

See ya.  I gotta go talk to some rocks.

Dr. Paul, Dr. Paul, Dr. Paul

"In the hospital, I hung on to the idea I'd had most of my life: that if I could just control the external environment, the internal environment would then be comfortable.  Life keeps gettingg simpler as we try to take care of the internal environment via the Twelve Steps, and letting the external environment take care of itself."  

"I was always able to see the flaw in every person, every situation.  A.A. has taught me that there is a bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad in the best of us; that we are all children of God, and we each have a right to be here.  When I focus on what's good today, I have a good day, and when I focus on what's bad, I have a bad day.  If I focus on a problem, the problem increases; if I focus on the answer, the answer increases."

I don't believe there is many a truth more universal than the tendency of substance abusers to find what's wrong and to ignore what's right.   This is probably a survival mechanism of long-standing efficacy.  The dumb people don't study their environment for threats and they get eaten by velociraptors or bit by pit vipers or they eat poisoned persimmons or they don't find anything to eat at all, poisoned or not.  So, great, I have good survival skills to rely on should I be dropped into an extremely hazardous place but the problem is, as I see it, that these skills have a certain amount of redundancy and are extraneous if I'm sitting in the sun on my porch.

A Tutorial

 How to Be an Alcoholic: A Tutorial

Alcoholics are negative.  If you're a positive person get the fuck outta here.  I've never met a naturally positive alcoholic and I've met a lot of alcoholics.  You need to be careful when talking to alcoholics because even if you are complimentary they will find a way to spin it negatively.

Alcoholics have a need for speed.  Alcoholics are not patient.  They do not drive the speed limit.  They never say: “No rush - take your time.”  They knock you down trying to get to the next thing that they need to do even if they don't even want to do it and especially even if they don't know what the next thing even is.

Alcoholics are terrified of change even though they aren't satisfied with the way things are and they want to change everything all at once and right now!  Not later!  I don't have to fucking think about it!

Doctor Paul, First Take

I'm not a huge fan of popular things.  I confess to a tendency to not like stuff that other people like.  I confess to a tendency to swim upstream, against the crowd.  If you tell me to do it then I can almost guarantee I'll do something else, usually the exact opposite.

Which brings me to Dr. Paul's story in the Big Book; originally it was called Doctor, Addict, Alcoholic but has been since changed to Acceptance Is The Answer.  It is very, very popular and oft quoted in meetings.  As I've been reading back through the story section of the Big Book I finally got to this story and I steeled myself against it.  I was prepared to dislike it.  

First of all, the dude is really funny.  Here are some quips that made me laugh out loud.

"I had sent Max (his wife) to four consecutive psychiatrists and not one of them had gotten me sober."

A reminder that it's always me.  It's never them.  No matter how much I want it to be them it's always me.

As his estimation of her mental health got worse and worse he eventually contacted a psychiatric hospital: "So, when it ended up in a psycho ward, I wasn't that surprised.  But then when that steel door slammed shut, and she was the one that went home, I was amazed."

Part of his treatment plan included group activities: "They wanted me to make leather belts, of all things!  Had I gone to school all those years just to sit and make leather belts?  Besides, I couldn't understand the instructions.  The girl had explained them to me four times, and I was too embarrassed to ask her again."

So if anyone ever makes a comment about drugs not being an appropriate topic in Alcoholics Anonymous let's at least remember that one of our most beloved stories had "Addict" in the title and there are a ton of highly descriptive passages about his drug use and they are uniformly hilarious.  Here's a sampling:

"The pep pills affected my hearing.  I couldn't listen fast enough to hear what I was saying.  I'd think, 'I wonder why I'm saying that again  - I've already said it three times.'   Still, I couldn't turn my mouth off."

"I found it hard to practice good medicine while shooting morphine.  At night I would put the  needle in my vein and then try  to figure out exactly how much medication to inject to overcome the pep pills while adding to the sleeping pills while ignoring the tranquilizers, in order to get just enough to be able to pull out the needle, jerk the tourniquet, throw it in the car, slam the car door shut, runs down the hall, and fall in bed before I fell asleep."

Dr. Paul, of course, began to see the light and to be truthful with himself.  For most of us, being honest with ourselves is one of the highest hurdles to overcome.  "I never in my life took a tranquilizer, sedative, or pep pill because I was a pill head.  I always took it because I had the symptom  that only that pill would relieve.  For me, pills don't produce the desire to swallow a pill; they produce the symptoms that require that the pill be taken for relief.  I had a pill for every ill, and I was sick a lot."

His epiphany about his drug use led him to this conclusion:  "Today, I feel I have used up my right to chemical peace of mind."

Not Fitting In

I've been rereading the stories in The Big Book.  Most of them are very familiar.  Some of them really hit home and some of them bore the shit out of me.  There's a lot of emphasis on the drinking part of our stories and not enough on the recovery part in some of the stories.  There are a few written by men and women who sound like pompous assholes or those interested in grandstanding, making their tales more dramatic than they need to be . . .  or probably were.  Most of the people I've met over the years in Alcoholics Anonymous have been functioning - or partially functioning - people trying to deaden the pain of the dissatisfaction they felt in their own lives.

There are also some themes and threads to be gleaned.  One if the tremendous relief and gratitude that we all feel when we find a solution that works for us.  Another is the responsibility we feel towards The Program and we turn this into the service work that sustains us as we bumble through life.  The one similarity that has been surfacing over and over is the feeling that we were lost in the game of life, that we felt different and disconnected and that we didn't know how or why and that we didn't know any other way to make these awful feelings go away except to drink to excess.  What a relief it has been to those of us who have been able to internalize the spiritual approach that manifests in the Twelve Steps.  Not for everyone, for sure, and we don't try to be but what a relief for those of us who find an answer in A.A.

Like, This is a Good One

One of the lessons I learned early on in my career as a Salesguy was that it was much more important to listen than to talk.  An incredibly difficult lesson to take to heart.  Our tendency is to want to convince another person of our point of view.  It is not a natural impulse to listen to their point of view.  I evolved in my profession so that I began to see how many times the other person was waiting for me to finish talking so that they could say what they wanted to say.  I learned that look meant that very little I was saying was sinking in so that my first best technique was to stop talking and start listening.  I also learned that most people are very uncomfortable with silence.  This is why you hear so many ahs and ums and you knows when people talk.  Even that second of silence is a killer so they have to fill it with a noise and if they keep talking they often gave me valuable information that I would have had to extract using some kind of powerful, turbo-charged suction machine. There's a new guy at our meeting who tosses in the nervous filler noise "like" many times when he, like, talks, at a, like, meeting.  He's trying to get his feet back on the ground and it makes him sound intellectually lazy.  He's a smart guy and he sounds, like, dumb.  I may have to say something to him.  I know, I know, I should keep my fucking mouth shut but I have a bit of influence over him and I can't help but think that this, like, might be a helpful bit of advice.

In one of my spiritual books the author was discussing how we can better deal with contentious people or just people with whom we have a differing opinion.  

Here were his suggestions:

1.  Look at the person's body language.

(Crossed arms?  Forget about it.  They're not receptive.  Backing away?  Looking off to the side?  Looking at their phone?  You're toast.  You've lost.  It's over.)

2.  Try to understand where they're coming from.

(I quit trying to explain the technical aspects of an infrared sensor to the purchasing agent.  And I didn't try to explain the cost/benefit analysis to the engineer.)

3.  Listen without planning your reply.

(Epically important!  If I'm thinking about my brilliant retort or quip then I'm not listening!)

4.  Express your opinion only after the person has finished talking, and only if they ask.  

(It goes without saying that they're almost never going to ask.  You'll be lucky if they, like, stop talking for a minute.)

5.  Notice your own attachments.

(Like, dude, if you don't buy a piece of my, like, stuff, I'm never going to make any, like, money.)

6.  Feel your own emotions.  

(If you're ticking me off then I'm tempted to come out swinging.)