The Things That are Supposed to Happen

Daily Gratitude List 12.2.22

I’m grateful to live here in New York. I’m grateful to watch the sun come up over the river, I’m grateful for things being generally where they’re supposed to be. I’m grateful that the things that are supposed to happen, generally do happen. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Happy Friday, as I am wont to say.¹ I was actually about to write, “things are crack-a-lacking over here at Sober HQ,” but then thought better of it.² If you haven’t had a chance to read Growing Pains: Sober Girls Edition from yesterday, well here’s the chance to do that and no one will be the wiser.³

Growing Pains: Sober Girls Edition

One of the things I find myself saying a lot is “the things that are supposed to happen, generally do happen.” One of the most important aspects of my sobriety has been coming to an understanding of how things work in the world. Why do things happen? What do they mean? What am I supposed to do? Those questions come up a lot for me. I find that I really don’t have much in the way of answers.

My own conception of God is some kind of pervasive, ineluctable, unavoidable force that animates and undergirds the Universe. I don’t think that specific events are necessarily locked-in or pre-ordained, but some stuff is unavoidable. I think that I can believe my God into existence and that the stronger my faith, the more powerful is my God. I’ve been reading “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia Butler, it’s a story of faith and love in a dystopian setting.⁴ I loved this:

God can’t be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that person’s resolve. If they’re used that way, they can help us in our only real relationship with God. They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on us. God is power, and in the end, God prevails.

Parable of the Sower, p. 25

I guess that’s what I mean by the things that are supposed to happen, generally do happen. I think we have the ability to resist things, shape things, avoid things, ignore things, manipulate things—in the near and mid-term. Eventually, the wheel always turns. I think we alcoholics are very prone to wanting to resist things, to push away the things we don’t want to deal with, think about or have to resolve. Drinking creates that special accountability-amnesia that I was so fond of.

But the wheel always turns. The things I was running from eventually caught up. The things I was hiding eventually came to light. The way I was living was coming to an inexorable end. My ability to forestall, change, manipulate, avoid these events was an illusion, a figment of my own imagination. That, to me, is the point of the Second and Third Steps: Realizing that I was not the center of the Universe, things were not run for my benefit. From there it was identifying the real source of power, the cohesive element in the Universe and in my life. Hint: It doesn’t come out of my head.

We get taught to fight for the things that matter to us. We’re told, “never give up,” and there is even a sense of shame in acceding to the inevitable. Of course, persistence and action are important in sobriety and life, but the question is how to balance those things, and that is the unwritten challenge of the Third Step:

What exactly is it that you are turning over to your Higher Power?

I’m not sure that fight to the end thing is always the right answer.⁵ Notably, Jesus did not try to organize a jailbreak and he consciously ignored Pilate's continued attempts at providing an "off-ramp." Bill W. describes the central conflict of sobriety as being the destruction of the ego. The thing in our alcoholic brains that tells us that we get to decide how things are going to happen and spurs us to even greater heights of drinking when other people stupidly refuse to go along. The point of working the Steps is the deflation of the ego, infusing life and outlook with humility, changing the nature of our seeking from what is right for us to what is right. That's a tall, f****** order.

One of the hardest parts of all of this is acceptance. Acceptance is a central element of the Big Book. As Shaggy the Yoga instructor⁶ says,

“You can't choose your outcomes, but you can choose how you experience them."

There are some things that have happened to me this year that I really, really didn't want to happen. But I also knew they had to happen, that there was no other way. This was very, very hard for me because I so desperately wanted to find a way to change things, prolong things, resist the inevitable. I agonized, wondered whether there were things I should have done differently, maybe things I could still do.

The wheel always turns. And it did this time, too. It made me very sad, but I knew it had to happen, knew it was the right thing and, more importantly, knew that the idea that I could resist this, forestall it, or could have changed something in the past that would have ordained a different result—well, all of that was simply not true. Those are the figments and relics of my alcoholic brain—the illusion of control. I never had it and still don’t.

I love this picture. I took it accidentally.

The real exercise is understanding that maybe I can’t understand everything. The hard part is accepting that I am just a player, not the director and the whole play is not about me. These are the thoughts generated by the untreated, alcoholic brain and it requires effort and work to change them. Changing those thoughts has been at the center of my sobriety and is the thing that helped end the obsession for me.

The things that are supposed to happen, generally do happen. My job is to accept, learn and continue. When I do that, even the hard things, the things that I really didn’t want to happen, they somehow make sense and fit together. When I do that, feelings of sadness or hurt or fear are surrounded by feelings of calm and peace, hope and love. When I do that, more often than not, I eventually get one of those wordless, completely ambiguous, almost laughable divine communications and I pick up another grimy penny or wonder why the Big Guy likes Steely Dan and “Peg” so much. But I know things are going to be ok.

Thanks for Letting Me Share

1. No one uses “wont” much anymore and it just kind of plopped out. I actually am more known for my slightly-ironic “Happy Monday” texts. I missed a Monday morning not too long ago and my daughter was sad, “they make me feel slightly better about feeling bad.”

2. I’m not 100% sure, but I think the footnote thing goes back to reading “Without Feathers” in the 7th Grade. I still laugh, out loud, just at the title of one particular essay about MENSA.

3. Actually, I do think reading this will make you wiser in some sense, potentially. I just meant that I won’t text Jane and say, “Guess who finally clicked on that link?”

4. If you want the absolute best book of this genre: “The Dog Stars.” That could actually be one of my favorite books of all-time.

5. Although, I’m going to tell you the single-greatest motivational speech I’ve ever heard was delivered by my friend Coach Pete to a bunch of Sixth Graders at halftime of a tied soccer game: “Boys, this is our Alamo…”

6. Not his real name. He looks exactly like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. He doesn’t know this is his nickname.