I’m grateful for basketball in the park. I’m grateful for an early, quiet morning. I’m grateful for too-healthy blueberry muffins. I’m grateful for nudges and pushes. I’m grateful for slowing down. I’m grateful for the coffee next to me, the music around me and the light in front of me. I’m grateful to be sober today.
We dropped another chapter of And Now a Word From Your Sponsor!1
What do I think about it?2 I think you should read it. Or, you can listen to it! It’s a brave, new multimedia world and who knows what’s next? A hologram of Your Sponsor perched on your shoulder helpfully whispering AA-related things as you navigate your day? Maybe that’s a touch too far. But you can listen to this and decide for yourself. If you like the idea, let me know and we’ll get to work on it over at Sober Labs. We haven’t officially launched Sober Labs or anything yet, but I think our branding will be a lot like this:
The “slowing down” line in the gratitude list today is not connected in any way to my age or physical condition. I’m really grateful to not feel like I have to do everything fast anymore. I have always been in a rush. I can remember sitting in my Algebra class in the 8th Grade and plotting out how I was going to become President. Of the Unite States. I had big ambitions. And it was important that I be the youngest president ever.3I knew I was going to law school and figured I’d have to spend a few years practicing before I launched my career. The big questions was whether I went House-Senate-President or House-Governor of Iowa-President. 4
It wasn’t enough for me to do things, I had to do them faster and better than everyone else. It didn’t matter if it was stuffing ad inserts in the Iowa City Press-Citizen or writing briefs at my law firm, I put an immense amount of pressure on winning and being the best and doing everything in record time.
I’m kind of clumsy and as I pay more attention to what I’m actually doing during the day, I realize the clumsiness is often borne of trying to do too much, too fast. I drop the thing I’m holding in my left hand because I’m trying to do something else at the same time with my right. When I cook, I used to be a blur of chopping and dicing and why? I’m not working on a line in a restaurant, I’m chopping up 3 cloves of garlic, not 300. I realized that my obsession with speed was making everything way more difficult than it needed to be.
Was my drinking connected to all of this? Yes. I don’t just do things fast, I think even faster. I connect dots at an astonishing rate and am especially good at connecting dots that are not visible to anyone else or just flat-out don’t exist. When I started drinking in high school, I realized that the greatest thing it did was slow me down, it gave me a little breather from my exhausting, always-spinning self. For the next 40 years, alcohol was what I used to try and keep that insane cyclone in my head in check.
The heartbreaking thing about alcohol is how it finally deserts you when you need it most. Alcohol seduces alcoholics by solving their problems. Drinking works for alcoholics until that horrifying day when it doesn’t anymore and life becomes a rapidly accelerating race against tolerance and the limits of how much you can actually drink to blot out the stuff that’s now pouring in. I remember the panic behind my drinking in those days.
I used to drink at a place called The Commissary almost every morning when things were really bad. They opened at 8am and were delighted to serve me sauvignon blanc with my pancakes. I arrived one morning at 7:55am, as I often did, and saw a stomach-dropping note on the door: They were closed because of a plumbing emergency. Where the F was I going to drink? I can still touch that feeling of panic. It’s 8am, where am I going to drink? Is that insane? Yes and that’s why Bill uses the word “insane” like five times on page 37 to describe the drinking and thinking patterns of a real alcoholic.
I know I still think and move too fast and I’m constantly reminding myself to slow down. The cool thing is that it’s working. I realize that not everything is a race against time. If it takes me 15 minutes longer to cook something, why am I worried? Who set a deadline? These are the thoughts of an alcoholic and one of the gifts of sobriety for this insane alcoholic is the sense of peace and ease that I have in my life. As things move more slowly, as I move more slowly, I’m finding, things work out way better. Sure, a blinding burst of speed on the basketball court is still in order every now and then, but the rest of my life doesn’t need to be that way.
For sure, I am and always will be the coyote at heart. You will never hear me root for the turtle or say that horrible thing about “slow and steady” winning. But, thinking more slowly, reacting more slowly, deciding more slowly, feeling more slowly—-those are all fantastic improvements. It turns out, the slower I think, the farther away I get from that last drink.5 Don't get me wrong, my alcoholic brain is always coming up with a plan for an even better and faster rocket, but the more I slow down, the less likely I am to strap myself on and try to catch that Roadrunner.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
It is a long title and I’ve now officially added the exclamation point at the end! If that denotes excitement for you, I think that’s great. I was thinking more along the lines of the German imperative verb form. Pas Auf!
The other thing I think is that the title is a mouthful, which is why we refer to it in-house as “ANAWFYS.”
Another dream thwarted. Thanks, Obama.
My career in elective politics ended in 1979 when I lost a tight race to Alan Braddock for Vice-President. My pledges to restore the smoking area back by the parking lot and improve the cafeteria food apparently did not resonate with or were not believed by my classmates.
For those keeping score at home, that was in October of 2019.
Really great post today. Perhaps the Universe is trying to tell me something since this message keeps cropping up...and because I can do nothing but go slow as I'm one week into a three-week stay with my brother while he recuperates from his transplant. He is currently slow. I am not. So I must slow down to match his pace.
I read a post a couple of weeks ago with a great prompt on slowing down. I saved it because I've been meaning to try it. Perhaps today's the day.
https://theisolationjournals.substack.com/p/sweeping-out-the-cobwebs
Thank you for this -- I really needed it today.