I’m grateful for another gorgeous morning. I’m grateful for getting to say that 7 times in a row. I’m grateful for enthusiasm and excitement. I’m grateful for the cup of coffee next to me. I’m grateful for hanging in, especially when the ending isn’t obvious. I’m grateful to be sober today.
It’s Friday and things are pretty good. Right?1 I was at a favorite coffee stop the other day (I love that they start work on that skim Cortado when I walk in) and exchanged pleasantries with that afternoon’s barista, he asked how I was, I nodded and said, “actually, I’m great today. You?” He smiled and nodded back, “I’m perfect.” We both laughed and I said “it’s just that kind of day, isn’t it? He laughed a little crazily, “yes, it’s just a great day.”
There was nothing terribly different about this day than the day before or the one before that one. Not to go full-throttle on the train to crazy-town,2 butI just have more and more days where there is a sense of connectedness and fullness that’s kind of hard to describe. It’s not that things are actually perfect, or that there aren’t lots of challenges, pretty serious practical problems. It’s just that every day turns out okay. I find myself summarizing the change in me since getting sober and it comes down to a very strong sense expressed in a pretty un-profound way:
I just know things are going to be okay.
I’ve learned that’s not the same as knowing how I want things. I spent a lot of time having very definite thoughts about how things should be, and was very, very busy sharing that knowledge with those lucky enough to be within proclaiming distance. Me and my alcoholic ego loved telling people what to do. When they failed to appropriately value the priceless gift I had bestowed upon them, my carefully distilled thoughts and knowledge, well, f*** me? No, f*** you. Then I’d go drink. Actually, I was probably already on the way to the Logan Tavern as I was texting that.
This approach wasn’t great for relationships and it wasn’t great for me. Those very definite beliefs of mine were actually just fences, mistakenly erected for slightly misguided, protective purposes. I’ve come to see the anger I felt when people didn’t follow along, was actually an expression of my own fear, “maybe I’m not right,” and then the whole cascading set of feelings around feeling “not enough,” or abandonment, or whatever the soup d’jour of dysfunction is being served that day in my head. Well, since you asked so nicely, I will have a glass of wine with that.
I feel like I write this a lot, perhaps the repetition is designed partly to persuade myself, but I just have this sense that things are going to be okay. Even when there is plenty of objective evidence supporting the other side of the proposition. Even when I still encounter those sudden free falls into existential-feeling fear, it’s just another moment to breathe through, to sit through. The weird freaky thing I’ve learned is that when that moment passes, the next thing that arrives is the right thing.
Meaning, the next thought, the next impulse, the next reflection, is usually the direction I ought to go. It doesn’t mean that next thing is easy or pleasant or what I wanted to happen or exactly the way I wanted it cooked, but it’s the Universe breaking through the curtainy static of fear with a pretty clear message: This is the next right thing, get used to it. If my Higher Power wanted to set this message to really cheezy 1970’s music, it might go like this:
In the olden days, even when I wasn’t drinking, I hung on to the idea that I knew the next right thing, and not just for me. I’m really hung up these days on “Into Action,” in the Big Book. I think I didn’t take the injunctions about not trying to direct the play seriously enough. Going from frustrated alcoholic director to frustrated, soberly enlightened, director ends up being a journey of not very much distance. Maybe this is the equation showing the conversion from alcoholic thinking to sober thinking
Higher Power x (Frustrated x Alcoholic x Director ) = Frustrated x Soberly Enlightened x Director
A lesson I’m taking from “Into Action” is that I need to take myself less seriously and take my director emeritus role way more seriously. It doesn’t mean that I don’t get to “do” things, the chapter is called, “Into Action,” after all. I think the point is that the source for my actions and directions ought to be coming from a different place, not just me and my old running buddy self-will using a new lexicon and throwing off fancy quotes. Taking the instruction of “Into Action,” seriously also sheds a different light on working the steps, I think.
The Steps, being written pretty tersely and formally, and there not being that many of them, can suggest a certain rigidity in approach. The emphatic injunctions of “How it Works,” to be “fearless and thorough,” can be read to amplify that call to orthodoxy. The road to redemption is narrow and arduous approach. I think coupling the words of “Into Action” and “How it Works,” actually suggests a much more individuated, perhaps even “loosey-goosey” approach.
Steps Two and Three do not work by being repeated every morning like the Nicene Creed on Sunday morning. I finally figured out Steps Two and Three involved not reciting Bill W’s creed, but finding my own. Those steps didn’t require me to believe in anyone’s else’s religion, they challenged me to find my own. My sobriety was dependent on connecting to that power, that source of inspiration and principle outside myself, that could, if and when sought, restore me to sanity. The real command of the Big Book is not to command. I think the Big Book’s suggested program of recovery involves resigning my commission and connecting to that power, living a life not solely of my commission, but a life where things are revealed and discovered.
I stuffed the two cookies I had also just purchased into my backpack for a covert library snack later. A tiny cup with three ounces of delicious, bitter-flavored brain fuel in hand, I cranked up the music and made ready for a jaunty exit onto 84th Street.3 I looked down and this is what I saw.
Tell me that’s not perfect.
If you’d like to make things a little bit better on a Friday morning…Well, this will 100% help.
Why I thought of this I don’t know. But Richard Scary’s Busytown is one of my favorite books and the software they developed in the 1990’s was and is fantastic. I still know the songs…
If you’d like to bop down the street with me towards the doggy day-care place on the other side of 2nd Avenue, here’s that music: