I’m grateful for all of these early mornings. I’m grateful for the sense that it’s time to get to work. I’m grateful for people who show up at the right time. I’m grateful for the things that had to happen. I’m grateful it’s almost October. I’m grateful to be sober today.
One of the things I had read about was the very cool subway art in Stockholm and it is pretty crazy stuff.
I have a thing for public transportation. When I moved here to NY, one of the things I was really excited about was mastering the subway, then I discovered the Ferry. Oh, goodness. My most prized possession is my Acela Select Executive card.1 You get the idea. I think it goes back to when I was a kid in Iowa City. The Iowa City bus system was pretty robust and I think the fare downtown was 35 cents. There was also the University-run Cambus, which was free, but ran less frequently and required a much longer walk.2
I think I was allowed to start taking the bus downtown alone when I was about ten and I just loved the freedom it gave me, the sense of independence. That was a pretty cool thing to learn and when I travel, whether it was for work or not, I always love using the local public transportation. I can get you where you need to go in a surprising number of cities—I’ve even ridden that stupid tram/skyway thing in Las Vegas.3
Anyway, I was sending a batch of pictures back to the kids and some of the subway shots were included. My son made a pretty funny comment explaining how I could avoid taking accidental photos in subway stations and sending them to other people. Ha Ha Ha. I got a text from my daughter yesterday morning:
Going to the Boston office for the first time. I have a quaint little commute—take the green line, which is more of a trolley.
During the long periods of estrangement, I often thought the road back was just impossibly-long. Impossibly-long in the sense that it could never happen. In early sobriety, climbing the one-day-at-a-time mountain seemed similarly impossible. I think that was maybe because I just couldn’t take my eyes off the horizon. I wanted so terribly to change, but I wanted all of the sobriety now and everything back the way I wanted it and I needed that to happen right away.
Not surprisingly, that attitude did not lead to very much sobriety. It certainly led me to tell people I had more time than I did. Maybe I only had 42 days, but I knew my shit better than a lot of people with a lot of time, so was it really so wrong to do a little AP AA? I didn’t think so. Coming to terms with those lies has been a very hard thing for me because I now see how deadly serious that all is and has to be. Not our topic today, however.
Things started changing for me when I changed the way I looked at the world.
That’s the essence of the “Acceptance” passage on page 417—learning to appreciate the things that bothered me, being grateful for things that I didn’t want to happen, treasuring the lessons I was being offered. I don’t know how that happened, precisely, that’s a big part of what I’m doing here, I think. Puzzling this all out a day at a time.4
I called my daughter back yesterday evening and caught her when she was on the way home. “Hey Dad,” and then the very distinctive trolley whistle blew and all of a sudden I was walking on 87th street between York and First with tears in my eyes. Someone way smarter than me told me that all you can do is show yourself honestly and authentically, create space and wait for the right people to show up. And the right people will show up, or come back, and find honest and authentic ways to connect. I get overwhelmed with emotion pretty frequently and I hear similar things from friends. I think, having been blocked off for so long, the feeling of true connection is just overwhelming, literally like drinking from a firehose.5 Even when it is over really, seemingly small things.
Maybe I’ll adjust eventually and find some new emotional equilibrium or maybe I’ll just keep on having outsized reactions every time I get a step closer to the people I love. Actually, I kind of already know.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
“Possession,” for purposes of this paragraph only, is limited to card-type items that fit in my wallet.
Cambus, however, was the perfect vehicle for literally day-long games of “Bus Tag.”
Stupid in the sense that it only seems to connect places you don’t want to go with other places you don’t want to go.
And you’re awfully kind to keep me company.
The good version of that—not the kind that sounds like water-boarding.
"...learning to appreciate the things that bothered me, being grateful for things that I didn’t want to happen, treasuring the lessons I was being offered..."
I've experienced a lot of that this year. Like anticipation of things that could happen has made me super anxious in the past. But now I have more of a f--k it attitude about them. I've accepted that I can't change most things and that my Higher Power will show me the way to deal with the crappy things that may happen. When I look back at the roller coaster, I realize that this year has not been according to my plan, the timing seemed just awful in my mind at the time. But in hindsight, everything worked out perfectly and mostly because I did not orchestrate the events.