Help Is Not Always What I Want To Give

At the conclusion of my morning meeting the secretary asks for anyone willing to be a sponsor to raise their hand.  Which I do not do.  The ostensible and actually quite plausible excuse I make is that I'm traveling so often I wouldn't be a good fit.  The real reason, more or less, is that I don't want to do it.  This isn't outrageous in its egregiousness but it's pretty self-absorbed.  Be that as it may I do it anyhow and regret it nohow.

Several months ago a guy who clearly wanted to ask me to be his sponsor commented on this and I told him I'd be happy to step in while reminding him I was going to be gone quite a bit.  He brushed this off while continuing to drink, the only reason he could find for stopping was getting arrested for driving while intoxicated.  He has been sober since but I don't think he really works a . . . you know . . . Program of any kind.  If he does it's news to me and I supposed to be his fucking sponsor.  In my estimation some of us are hands-off as we work with new people, preferring to let our actions be the  message and some of us are hands-on, setting up tasks and schedules and the like.  Both are fine and both work with the right messenger and the right message-receiver.

I spoke with this dude this morning.  It went as it always does.  He talked a good deal about himself and his difficulties while implying that his difficulties were mostly illogical and unfair.  If he had expressed even the most remote interest in what I might have to say I might have said something but he clearly wanted to talk and that was that.  I knew this was coming so I made sure I had something productive to take up my time while he was droning on and on, his voice a tinny afterthought in my severely muted earbuds.  My point is that he wanted someone sympathetic to listen to his spiel.  He did want my advice.

Telling It Like It Is

From an A.A. pamphlet called "A Member's Eye View of Alcoholics Anonymous" I came across these thoughts on how members try to pass along the message to new people . . . 

"The intuitive understanding that an alcoholic receives while compassionate, is not indulgent.  He is not asked what he is thinking.  He is told what he is thinking.  No one waits to trap him in a lie.  He is told what lies he is getting ready to tell.  In the end, he begins to achieve honesty by default.  There's not much point in trying to fool people who may have invented the game you're playing."

In terms a tad more crass: You can't bullshit a bullshitter.  It's not especially hard to spot the people who are doodling along without much conviction in their first tentative actions.  Face it - most people are not going to get sober or they are not going to get sober in Alcoholics Anonymous or they are not going to get sober in the meetings I attend.  This, while sad, is neither here nor there, and I say it without judgement.  It simply is.  It's hard to get sober and for this reason most people don't carry through with our Program.  Many of us are committed evangelists for the A.A. way of life at the start.  Many of us learn that trying to convince someone of something when the individual isn't open to the idea is not going to go very far.  Again, this is not a criticism.  It's an indicator of how hard it is to get sober.  And maybe how pigheaded we all are at the beginning.

Pass It On

"There is a direct linkage among self-examination, meditation, and prayer.  Taken separately, these practices can bring much relief and benefit.  But when they are logically related and interwoven, the result is an unshakable foundation for life."  12&12 p. 98     

I love this reminder.  Synergy - the concept that the combined effect of two or more entities is greater than the sum of their individual effects.

The twelfth month of the year often stimulates a discussion on our Twelfth Step work.  Responsibilities might be a better word as we're reminded time and time again that nothing so much ensures our sobriety as work with another alcoholic.  And Dr. Bob, in his summation of why he continued to go to meetings, listed repayment of his debt to the men who took the time to pilot him through early sobriety.  They didn't ask for this repayment; he understood that the gift they received by helping someone else was one he could also expect to receive . . . so long as he jumped in and began to help new people.  A guy in my meeting recently said that his sponsor told him that "the first year was all about you and after that it's about what you can pass on to someone else."  Good advice.  Great advice.

Alcoholics are not easy to talk to early on.  They are resistant.  One of the benefits of Alcoholics Anonymous is that our members really try to speak as an equal, as a fellow sufferer instead of as an authority who is telling someone what to do, either as a punishment for bad behavior or as an enticement towards good behavior.  Man, do we hate to be told what to do.  Man, does it ring hollow when someone without the alcoholic affliction tries to give advice - advice often given with good intentions and a genuine desire to be helpful.  I never tell anyone "I know what you're going through" unless I know what they're going through.  It's insincere to tell someone who is suffering that I understand when I don't, in fact, understand.

 

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!