I’m grateful for a really beautiful morning. I’m grateful for seeing I only have to be myself. I’m grateful for seeing what’s worth holding on to. I’m grateful for a two-morning streak on excellent coffee. I’m grateful to be sober today.
For awhile, I’ve wanted to write about the difference between spirituality and religion, the difference between Christian formulations of God and the Big Book’s Higher Power and how frustrating it is when people reflexively reject the Big Book or the Program because they’re scientists, or hate organized religion or see it as a crazy God-based cult.1 But before I tackle all of that, I’d like to spend a little time explaining my views of the Multiverse and sobriety.
Loosely and imprecisely explained, the Multiverse is the idea that there are multiple incarnations of our Universe, all with slight variations, running more or less simultaneously. It’s theoretically possible to access these parallel universes, we might call that time-travel in some sense, and my understanding of that is limited largely to a fair amount of unhinged musings, some science fiction novels and a Ryan Reynolds movie I saw not so long ago. I’m not going to get into time travel here; it is a subject I’m greatly interested in and have a specific project in mind, but it gets complicated really fast. And you’re here for answers, not musings.2
I think the best explication of the Multiverse theory is in the movie Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse. It turns out that there are multiple versions of Spiderman existing along the space-time continuum—differences driven by the vagaries and probabilities of the Multiverse. In the movie, many of the “Spidermen” band together to fight off an existential threat.3 Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t provide much of a blueprint for accomplishing this. Also, it’s animated if that’s something that would affect your views on the credibility of the source.
Why am I talking about this?4 I wonder if I could go back in time, would I be able to stop drinking before I did? Could I have avoided being an alcoholic altogether?5 At many levels, those are not practical questions, but as I started to untangle my alcoholic life, part of me was wondering whether some or all of this had to happen. That’s a really sad thought, that all of this had to happen; I like to think that a lot of the pain I caused to others and myself was avoidable. But maybe not. Maybe the way it works is the accumulation of grief, tragedy, shame, humiliation and loss is eventually too powerful, too much, and it overwhelms the alcohol-built retaining wall and spills over into all of the other compartments, finally prompting the realization that I just couldn’t live this way any longer. In that case, there probably was never much of an opportunity to foreshorten this.
It also means that there is a universe out there where I was meant to be an alcoholic. I’m not sure that’s so far-fetched. Whether that’s by operation of probabilities, a devious 13-year-old boy running a simulation, or my faith-inflated Higher Power, I can’t tell you with any certainty. But of all of the possible explanations for why I’m a sixty year-old alcoholic, living in New York for the first time with three years of sobriety and writing all of this, the one I choose to believe is that every:
Person, place, thing, or situation [is] exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake.”
Big Book, p. 417
The great thing about that Universe, which is also potentially this one, is that taking the viewpoint that I was placed on the board with an “alcoholic” marker already on me, means I don’t have to spend so much time trying to determine what exactly made me veer so far off course, what were the factors at work that helped produce an alcoholic like me. In that Universe, the point is making life better, learning the lessons that were put in front of me, time-after-time, seeing what I can change and sharing about it, since that helps me and might give someone else the idea that they could salvage their life, too.
There are some Universes I’d really like to visit, and even though they’re just a couple of Universes over, I know it’s pretty complicated getting there. One in particular is going to require a multi-jump trip and will involve convincing a younger version of me, a pretty alcoholic version of me, to do something pretty improbable, but it’s good to have a project. In the meantime, this Universe, the one that involves a highly, highly unlikely rescue and a set of follow-on events that defies any traditional method of calculating probabilities, the one where I introduce myself as an alcoholic and get to write about what saved my life, that’s a pretty groovy place to be for now.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
Also, from what I understand about cults, AA seems like a pretty inhibited, quiet, boring one. If you were going to join a cult, I feel like you could do much worse.
Note: This view is likely setting you up for disappointment.
Can there be an existential threat to the Multiverse?
Feel free to come up with five new topics every week. Sometimes there is grasping involved.
Note: This is not the specific time-travel project mentioned earlier.
I contemplate theories on the Universe daily. Jumping through time...all the time. My favorite part of the book talks about launching into the 4th dimension. In the work of the steps and continually using step 11 for step 12, the mental Universe, physical(body) Universe, and spiritual Universe can reveal themselves. Creating that possibilty for fluid access to that 4th dimension. I have played basketball with my 12 year-old self in meditation, and he told me he is still with me and still loving the show! Great post!! Congrats on 3 years! Was your anniversary recent?