Gravity

I’m grateful for getting to see a gorgeous sunrise. I’m grateful my son is home. I’m grateful for knowing myself. I’m grateful for exactly what I have. I’m grateful for a Friday morning and a chance to see a sponsee. I’m grateful for things that grow and patience. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

As I always say on Friday mornings, “this was going to be so different.” The song of the week was going to be an old Genesis song and I had pretty much written the whole thing in my head and it was going to be so good. What happened, you ask? I watched the sun come up while I sipped a few cups of very strong coffee and did a little of my morning R&R. No, it’s not rest and relaxation, it’s rumination and reflection, and it’s often not a great thing.

He may not know this, but Elvis Costello has profoundly impacted and shaped my life. The song of the week was a hit in 1977 and yours truly was 15 and in the process of having his heart broken. You see, there was this girl. Our last names both started with “B” so we met in the 8th grade when we ended up sitting next to each other (in a row) in a class that was being taught in one of the temporary building behind the junior high. The day we met, she was wearing a “Captain Fantastic” t-shirt and those big bulky glasses that were somewhat fashionable (maybe only in Iowa) in the mid-1970s.¹

We became friends, lots of joking around and the walk back to the main building from the “temporary” was where a friendship blossomed. I use the phrase, “friendship,” only because that probably reflected the average (or maybe the median) of our collective feelings for each other. I was very much, head over heels in love. Sadly, and despite my best efforts, Northwest Junior High was not to be the situs of a great love story.

Of course, she knew nothing of this. At least until we got to high school. From my perspective, our lives were pretty enmeshed. We talked a lot on the phone (I would leave the house and walk to the pay phone at the corner of Melrose and Koser, so my brother and snooping mother would not be listening in²), we hung out together in school. We were both on the debate team and when we got to high school I helped elect her older brother as maybe the most unlikely homecoming king in West High Trojan history.³

Eventually, I mustered the courage to share my feelings with her and ask her to go out with me. In a thunderclap of a moment, I found out she had a boyfriend and he was older—already at the university. I mean, I was shaving by this point, at least about twice a week; I knew I was beaten.

That didn’t stop me from trying and it didn’t stop me from really, really, really wishing things were different. It’s possible I made a real spectacle of myself in the process. Into this stewpot of regret, drama and bereft sadness, along comes Elvis Costello singing “Alison.” One of the greatest songs about an ex-girlfriend that has ever been written.⁴ It’s so perfect in so many ways. The lines are all Elvis Costello super-clever,

‘Cause I don’t know if you were loving somebody, 
I only know it isn’t mine

This was my tragedy anthem. I played this album over and over and over. I sang this song in my head to myself over and over and over. It so perfectly captured the way I felt; the bereft, bitter, forlorn, but don’t worry about me persona I was already constructing. A persona which became an alcoholic dream home (or maybe hermit crab shell is more appropriate). I listened to this song, or sang it to myself on my long late night walks and felt really and juicily sorry for myself. A life already filled with romantic regret and failure and I could barely even drive.

I am going to admit that during the process of coming up with names for my not-yet-born daughter, I did throw “Alison” into the hopper, forgetting that my wife knew how much I loved that song because I still played it all the time.⁵ I was told that we were not going to name our daughter in honor of a song about an ex-girlfriend.⁶

For a variety of reasons, I have been unable to listen to this song for a while. Until today. I was looking for the song that was supposed to be the song of the day and Youtube “suggested” this and I listened to it for the first time in a while. Man, is it a great song. And this acoustic version by a very young Elvis is super moving and cool.

This song was instrumental (no pun intended) to the personality that was being constructed, consciously and unconsciously during my youth. It captured my outlook so perfectly, I came to love the feeling of being alone, the feelings of loss and sadness being bravely tolerated, the solitary life being silently applauded.⁷ All of that sadness and emptiness left a lot of room for drinking, and the drinking sure made the sadness and emptiness feel grand, creating a pretty effective alcoholic flywheel. That sadness and emptiness were like a huge blackhole, one building inside of me and exerting an incredibly strong, but unseen gravitational pull; a pull so strong it warped my personality.

I read this great book a few years ago, “Designing Your Life,” and I’ve mentioned it here before. It was written by two Stanford professors who teach design and the book is the application of the principles of successful design to one’s own life. To be honest, when I first read this book, 7 or 8 years ago, I was hoping it could be a substitute for the Steps and the Big Book—because I knew that was going to involve not drinking and I was still hoping to achieve a less drastic result.⁸

I’m struck now by how similar the approaches were. “Designing Your Life” encourages an inventory-taking process and one of the elements of this process is identifying the sources of gravity in one’s life. “Gravity,” meaning the things that cannot be avoided, the things that are true, the things that have to be accounted for. DYL (I’m shortening “Designing Your Life” from here on) gives the example of someone who wants to pursue a career in poetry, yet also has expectations about living in a swanky house and traveling around the world. You see, that’s probably not going to work out that way, owing to the relatively low salaries earned by your average poet. That design will not work. That life is not sustainable.

So, the process begins with an assessment of where you are in life, identifying the things you’d like to change, the things you’d like to incorporate. You figure out what can actually be accomplished, accounting for things like gravity, and you develop a plan for pursuing this life you’ve designed. You know what that process reminds me of:

God, 
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 
the courage to change the things I can, 
and the wisdom to know the difference

“Gravity” has another meaning in this context. In the cosmos, gravity shapes the universe. The massive gravitational pulls of blackholes are capable of warping time and creating whole universes. I think “gravity” is commonly thought of as something that holds us back, holds us down, binds us to reality; but I think gravity is really the great destructor/creator of entire worlds.

In very simple terms, black holes work by sucking in all forms of matter with this intense and unseen gravitational force. The more matter that is pulled over the event horizon, the stronger the gravitational force being generated, until one “day” when the whole thing explodes and spews matter out at an inconceivable scale.⁹ Thus, are entire universes born.

Like Wile E. Coyote, alcoholics are bad at understanding gravity.

The 1000 Deaths of Wile E. Coyote

Among the great misunderstandings that we alcoholics have about gravity are :

(a) This does not apply to me; 
(b) I do not exert any gravitational force on anyone else.

Both of these propositions are demonstrably false. At the bottom of this alcoholic’s wine glass was the belief that I didn’t matter enough to other people; that I definitely should matter more to other people; and that I was entitled to be angry and resentful that I didn’t matter more to those pesky people. A corollary to this was the idea that my drinking was only my drinking and didn’t really “concern” other people.

I’m good, people. This is how I’m supposed to roll. Get over yourselves. Yes, I would like another…

Or words to that effect. I think most of us share that belief, that we just don’t matter enough to the people around us; I certainly hear a lot of people talk about it at meetings. One of the beautiful things about recovery is coming to understand and accept how much we do matter to the people we love. How much the way we live our lives can impact the lives of those we’re connected to. Of course, this can be a positive or a negative thing. I think recovery is actually about taking those negative aspects and reimagining them into positive things, things to be grateful for.

Understanding gravity has been a key to recovering the relationships with my children. I can see how my life as an alcoholic warped their own lives, how much they were pulled and shaped by their love and connection to me. For sure, while I was drinking, their love and connection to me brought pain and sadness and anger. Things are very different these days.

Recovery has been the chance to change that for the people I love, and for me. When I see my true self, when I recognize my own foibles, strengths, weaknesses and eccentricities, when I’ve done the work of taking my own inventory and realistically seeing what I can change and then courageously pursuing that change, that has an impact on the people around me. But it’s a positive impact, not an alcoholic asteroid impact, like the olden days.

Gravity is a beautiful thing. Gravity can bind us to each other and to the lives we were meant to lead. I find that gravity works on its own, it doesn’t need me at the controls. My job is to become stronger, strong enough to attract whatever it is that is meant for me. Gravity takes time to work and requires patience, but in the end it accomplishes what nothing else can: It keeps me exactly where I’m supposed to be at this moment. I like it here.

Happy Friday.

1. My subsequent high school girlfriend is pictured on this actual Time magazine cover and our high school was profiled in the article.

2. Yes, an actual thing.

3. Also an actual thing: A good trojan never breaks under pressure. Someone mischievously put that up on the scoreboard in the gym where the players names were supposed to go…

4. I get that one must be a “girlfriend” before one can be an “ex-girlfriend.” It just sounds better than “the object of my unreturned affections.”

5. Along with other Elvis Costello albums.

6. For the record, there is no ex-girlfriend named “Alison.”

7. A little quieter than a golf clap. By the way, that’s something the pros very much try to avoid. Thank you, I’m here all week.

8. Sometimes this is referred to as “an easier softer way.”

9. The explosion from this last one near us is still rippling 5 billion years later.