New Year's in Paris

daily gratitude list 1.1.23

I’m grateful for a new year and very grateful for 2022. I’m grateful for finding more of myself. I’m grateful for the people who shared the year with me. I’m grateful for all of the lessons I was given and for those who taught me. I’m grateful to be sober today.

I’m so glad some of you see what could be happening here.¹ It’s New Year’s Day in Paris. It’s rainy and a little windy, my Airbnb has fewer than 8 pieces of furniture in it and required a flashlight and some serious stamina to navigate umpteen steeps to the garret, the “bed” is about 18 inches off the floor and even though it’s just me, the bathroom is so small, I’ll probably have to shower in shifts. It struck me last night that I’m absurdly happy.

I got to Gare d’Nord and hustled to the taxi stand because I knew it was going to be nutty getting around last night. It was. There was a scrum where a number of lanes merged that literally resembled the battle scenes from movies like BraveHeart or Kingdom of Heaven and my cab driver spoke only pretty loud, kind of aggressive-sounding french.² We did just fine. We bonded when he nearly hit (or maybe hit a little) a douchey guy on a motorbike who maybe kind of deserved it. The motorbike guy yelled at us for a minute pointing at his mostly uninjured leg and I said “assh***,” when he drove off. My cab driver appreciated the gesture quite a bit; We even negotiated an ATM stop so I could get cash.

There is a code for the front door, a kind of complicated trek across an open courtyard, a very tiny elevator with a second code (and kind of finicky buttons), then three flights of stairs to the garret. As mentioned, it’s sparsely furnished and you might use the word “drafty,” I can’t really stand up in a lot of parts of it owing to the sloping roof, but it has three big skylights cut into the roof that provide a magnificent view. I went out for a walk, saw everyone out celebrating then end of 2022, reconnoitered the neighborhood, got some provisions and went back, exhausted. I was in bed, not so concerned about seeing a ball or whatever drop somewhere else, and I started to hear booming noises. I got out of bed and went to the window and saw the most amazing view. The Eiffel Tower was lit up and flashing and the fireworks over the Arc De Triomphe were going crazy.

I stood there and watched in the dark for a few minutes and then I was just completely overwhelmed. I kind of am now writing about it. It wasn’t sad or melancholy or anything like that—I was interrogating myself about the source of the tears running down my cheeks and there was only a laugh in reply. This is not something that occurred when I was drinking. I talk to other alcoholics who frequently report the same phenomenon: Being overwhelmed at times when it is not-so-expected. My own theory is those moments are a consequence of being connected to My Higher Power. There are times when the Big Guy wants to make a statement of some kind and just turns on the firehose. Be ready!

Excuse me, is this the path you’ve been talking about?

Is everything perfect? No. But that’s not really a question I ask anymore. Perfectionism is part of my story, too. Not the Michael Scott, “My biggest weakness is that I just care too much and work too hard,” version. The version where I secretly or not-so-secretly knew that I always could have done better, should have done better. That things would have turned out differently if I had just done a slightly better job, worked a little harder, maybe didn’t drink as much. My species of perfectionism turned everything in my life into a series of might-have-beens and look-what-you-losts—all of which manufactured more shame, which, in turn, is a perfection invitation to drink. One that I rarely never declined.

2022 had some really hard moments. There was some grief and loss for me. But there was joy and love and true happiness. Of course, there were 365 calendar days of sobriety—and 365 days of gratitude lists. Is it possible those things are connected? I learned so much in 2022, more than I could possibly have anticipated on December 31, 2021. There were plenty of classes that were taught in 2022 that I would never have signed up for or attended if I knew what they were really about. But I was better for doing so. Maybe that was one of the themes of 2022 for me: I learned to stop trying to do better and just be better.

Does that make sense? There are lots of things, skills, tasks that I could be better at, and those are the kinds of things I list on my lists of resolutions.³ What I'm talking about here is running my life on the principle that things are exactly where they need to be, when they need to be there. My real job is being better at accepting that, which, maybe tautologically translates to just being better. Also being grateful.

I’ve learned how to be grateful for things that I really didn’t want to happen. I don’t think that comes from just re-titling things. It comes from really looking and trying to understand what the purpose was, what the lesson was, how this made me a better person or took me somewhere I needed to go or showed me something I needed to see. Those lessons are painful and they are precisely the reason I drank. But now I see how important they are; how much they have changed me.

2022 was a big year for me. I turned 60. I celebrated three years of sobriety. Great things started and some beautiful things ended. During my walk through the Jardin des Luxembourg I was wondering what song I would pick, if I needed to best exemplify the year. I quickly realized there was not one song that could fit the bill. But here are two songs that I’ve been listening to a lot the last few months and I think they may play a part in my unfathomable level of contentment.

I fell in love with this first song in the 4th or the 5th grade (that’s like 1971-ish). I remember being at the Pizza Hut in Iowa City ( a special Friday night treat and a more sedate experience than Shakey’s) and they had a pretty cool jukebox.⁴ My Dad gave me and my brother a quarter, which meant we got three songs: My brother got 1, I got 1 and then we negotiated over the third. My song was this:

I love the super-grabby intro, but what a fantastic song. I started listening to it again a few months ago and it’s been in heavy rotation since then. It’s perfectly emblematic of the complicated musical tides of the early 1970’s and it’s just a badass combination of cowbell, piano and brass. There’s a line in it that grabbed me in 1971 and I still love it today. It comes right after the first instrumental break about 90 seconds in and right after a Phil Collins-style drum solo. I kind of get chills each and every time I listen.⁵

Another song that’s been in heavy rotation lately, too:

Here are the lines I really like and will be key components of my core philosophy for 2023.

Finally got myself together, Baby
and I'm having a ball
as long as you're grooving, 
there's always a chance...

I hope 2023 is off to a magnificent start for you. I’m heading back out in the rain so that you all will have pictures of the Tour de Eiffel to look at tomorrow. I have a pretty good idea what I’ll be listening to on the walk over.

Happy New Year.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. You all have said many nice things to me about what gets written here, and I’m actually pretty touched by it. It also makes me profoundly uncomfortable and it maybe partly explains why I gravitate to the footnotes and buttons . But I do really feel that some of my best writing is down here and up there. I even tried serializing a hypothetical conversation about subscribing in the buttons for a bit—not sure I would describe it as Dickensian. Maybe cute? Anyway, my hat is off to you very kind, thoughtful people who says such nice things.

2. If you want a truly excellent movie, and I mean truly excellent, watch Hopscotch with Walter Matthau. It’s about a Mozart-loving middle-aged man who faces a crisis with great aplomb and humor. I’m not joking here. The only thing I wonder is why couldn’t it have been Cary Grant or someone like that?

3. I keep lists of lists, so that usage is actually appropriate.

4. There’s an unexplored love affair: My love of jukeboxes. All of my spots, in the old days, had pretty groovy jukeboxes.

5. If I just tell you, it won’t have nearly the impact of you doing the research.