I’m grateful for a bright sunny morning. I’m grateful for being able to see what I couldn’t before. I’m grateful to not have to react. I’m grateful for the people who can make me laugh. I’m grateful for exactly where I am and what I have. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I had a great idea for this morning’s gratitude list. I was on the phone when the idea came to me and it was really, really good. So good, I grabbed a piece of scratch paper and made some notes. I arrived at my desk this morning, some coffee under my belt and ready to unleash some profundity. Unfortunately, my note to myself is barely legible and doesn’t really make any sense, so we’re going a different way this morning.
It took me ten years of trying to get sober to actually muster one year of continuous sobriety. I tried everything I could think of, went to tons of AA meetings (often drunk or intended to be soon) and nothing could shake me off that barstool. There were a number of reasons, all of them pretty powerful and none of them really very good, but I think the central culprit was simply a lack of imagination. I couldn’t manage to even imagine a life that was’t mediated by, and steeped in alcohol. Drinking wasn’t a fun thing I did with friends to celebrate things or just blow off a little steam; it was my essential navigational aid for getting through this world. There was no way I could imagine life without it.
I was a young lawyer at a big law firm in the early 1990’s, when the whole “re-imagining” thing ran through corporate America. I was asked to be a part of the task force formed to “re-imagine the Litigation Department” of our law firm. This struck me as being equal parts of dumb, pointless and maybe possibly entertaining. My suggestions ranged from a Mobile Litigation Support Vehicle (“MLSV”)(have you watched Stripes before?), to a friendlier name or maybe turning over more power to the Associates? My suggestions were not taken too seriously and this is also the reason there was no prototype developed of the potentially game-changing MLSV.
This was a pointless exercise because the Litigation Department existed as a part of a much bigger whole and had but one real purpose—none of which was really up for “re-imagining” or real change. My cycling through alcoholism treatments and cures was pretty similar—I was willing to change all kinds of cosmetic things, try all sorts of crazy treatments involving eye movement or punching inanimate objects, even the super crazy “Sinclair Method,” where alcoholics “drink their way to sobriety.”1 As long as I was trying to find a way to run my life with a big hole in the center, where the drinking used to be, I could maybe manage 60 or 90 days—-but sooner or later there was going to be an event, or a lack of an expected event, or a change in the weather or my mood, or it was an odd-numbered day, and I’d be back at at one of my spots staring a flinty Sauvignon Blanc down. There was no re-imagining the role of alcohol in my life.
What changed? I reached a point where I had to re-imagine myself. The self-will run riot version of me was never going to get sober. The self-will run riot version of me would have been happy transforming my daily alcoholic drinking into non-alcoholic daily drinking courtesy of the Sinclair Method, but that wasn’t going to really change anything was it? The most confusing part of AA and the Big Book is the idea of a spiritual awakening. It gets translated by people into signing up for some crazy old white man imagined religious cult—and why would being part of a cult be necessary for me to stop drinking?
That is a carefully constructed question, primarily designed to allow one to continue drinking in peace. My life was designed around drinking, it was part of the fabric, it was how I navigated the world, it took the sharp edges off and let me ignore what I desperately wanted to ignore. I think what happens at the bottom is that you finally see just how much you’ve been lying to yourself—about nearly everything. You finally see this isn’t how everyone else lives, that this is corroding and destroying everything it touches, that this does not create peace or joy or anything close to happiness.
That comes from one simple exercise of imagination:
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a Power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.
Big Book, p. 12
Is it really that hard to imagine that there might be a power in the Universe greater than ourselves?2 To me, the idea there isn’t such a power is the more difficult proposition to prove. And here’s the thing, as long as you’re interested in proving what does and doesn’t exist as a prerequisite for sobriety, my guess is that there will be a fair amount of drinking involved—there always was for me. I think the point of all this is to come to a life that has humility rather than self-centered hubris at the center. This simple act of imagining a power greater than oneself that might be capable of restoring sanity is what unlocks the door. It’s what allows us to see what always needed to change in our lives—-the ringmaster running the crazy clown show.
My life these days is full of mind-boggling coincidences; instances where the right result falls into my lap without me needing to engage in any concerted action or manipulation. It’s harder for me to imagine that I led my life in the darkness for so long, somehow convincing myself that the glint off the wine in my glass was sunlight. Sobriety did end my drinking, but it was the beginning of pretty much everything else for me. It started with a simple act of imagination—that was all that was necessary for me to make my beginning.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
One of the central tenets of the Sinclair Method is to rigorously and honestly keep track of how much you actually drink. This is where it really broke down for me as I was incapable of the kind of self-honesty that allows one to accurately record how much they drink. Next time you hear someone breathlessly explaining the problem is you spend too much time obsessing about not being able to stop drinking and that all you need to do is adopt this easier, softer way of combatting alcoholism—which conveniently involves drinking as much as you want, ask these people if they will share their “drinking log,” the cipher that will show their alcohol consumption tending towards zero or a “manageable number.”
If you’re having trouble imagining a force greater than yourself, may I suggest gravity?