I’m grateful for a cloudy, cold morning. I’m grateful for new intentions. I’m grateful for understanding where things are. I’m grateful for seeing what my part needs to be. I’m grateful for new ideas and inspiration. I’m grateful for getting things down on paper. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Welcome to the first installment of a 237-part feature I’m going to humbly call “How it Works.” The deeper into all of this that I sink, delve, dig (whatever your view), one thing that starts to emerge is how serious Bill W. and the Big Book were about the whole working with other alcoholics thing. I mean, this is pretty unambiguous for a book about an as-yet undefined disease with no real treatment:
Practical experience shows that nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics.
Big Book, p. 89
Note: The offer of alcoholic immunity does not flow from simply chatting with other alcoholics— it is premised on “intensive work” with other alcoholics and is consistent with the Big Book’s notion that sobriety is dependent upon the widening and deepening of one’s spiritual life and experience. “Intensive work” with other alcoholics necessarily involves examining the tenets of your own philosophy of sobriety and for me, the question I’m always trying to answer is:
What exactly happened?
I went from incorrigible, nothing-worked, “AA is silly and ineffectual, I have no choice but to drink” to, well, a Big Book thumping semi-zealot who gets up in the morning and writes about this all the time. I’m kind of taken with the cooking metaphor these days, so what I’m really trying to figure out is what are the ingredients of sobriety, how did I put them together and would I do it differently. Those are all questions that get answered if I try to put together an actual recipe. I also proceed from the premise that there is some kind of magic in this recipe—because it is not always clear how combining the ingredients actually produces the miracles.
One can get hung up on a chicken and egg type analysis and try to figure out which ingredient has to be the first in the bowl. The Big Book says the beginning is premised on “willingness,” and we’ve talked a lot about that here. You might think of willingness as something like salt or MSG—not only an essential element, but also something that intensifies and enhances the impact of the other ingredients.
I think Gratitude is one of the fundamental building blocks. When I moved to New York during the Pandemic, I was trying to hang on to nine months of white-knuckle, no meetings, no Program, no drinking. It was a pretty precarious position and it was a struggle getting through days. I was living in a sober house in a new city, mostly cut-off from my old life, with no foreseeable future in the middle of the pandemic. Part of hitting bottom for me was realizing there was going to be no cavalry riding to the rescue. Just that deep, dark, very frightening realization that I was kind of in this by myself.
I still struggle with that. I was lucky enough to get connected to exactly the right person at the right time and it didn’t take him long to see one of things missing from my life: Gratitude. It was “suggested” that I might benefit from doing a daily gratitude list and, well, you kind of know how that’s turned out. Here was the very first one, from November 19, 2020:
November 19 Gratitude List
I’m grateful for my children and the prospect of seeing them soon. I’m grateful to have so many friends in the program and to be able to get support at meetings. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be starting over and grateful to be able to do it here in New York. I’m grateful for the courage to sit through days like this. Grateful to have you as a sponsor and a friend.
It kind of took with me. Here’s one from December 2020, looking back, I can see how the lens of gratitude was allowing me to start working on the other elements of sobriety:
It's another gorgeous morning and I'm grateful to be sober. I'm grateful for the Sunday newspaper and grateful for the days when I can finish the crossword puzzle. I'm grateful to be able to wake up on a morning like this, make coffee and listen to music with a clear head. I'm grateful to live a life not dominated and controlled by alcohol. I'm grateful for my friends and particularly for my friends in AA. I'm grateful to wake up on a Sunday morning and feel free and content, to be able to be excited about the day. I'm grateful to not feel the crippling anxiety that goes along with drinking. I'm grateful to have the chance to rebuild my life; to know real happiness; to truly connect with other people and to live the life that God intends for me. I'm grateful to not be trapped in the web of lies that went along with drinking. I'm grateful to be able to do the next right thing. I'm grateful for the holiday season and for the love and excitement that goes along with it. I'm grateful for the people who love and care about me—and for the chance to love and care about them.
If the thing at the center of alcoholism and addiction is a dysfunctional ego, the alcoholic sense that we’re never quite getting what we should be getting, gratitude seems to be one of the forces that helps neutralize it. Writing a gratitude list every day, even on the days when I woke up afraid and alone and wondering where all of this was going, what was I going to do, how was I going to start over at almost 60 years old? How to escape the growing sense my life was not much more than a series of escalating and ridiculous mistakes? How to escape the growing sense that all that was left for me was to write the last check to cover the damages and then shuffle off this mortal coil?
Gratitude. Writing out what I’m actually grateful for every morning has changed me. Fear is one of the things that drives addiction. Writing a gratitude list every morning forced me to see that maybe things weren’t so bad, maybe there were little slivers of hope here and there, maybe things aren’t so bleak after all. Gratitude also worked wonder with self-pity and the angst that comes from not being able to control people and outcomes like you used to. But still, the half-life of the whole gratitude thing was a bit variable, that’s why I was still taking antabuse.
Then I happened on the other aspect of gratitude— sharing it. I had been writing these long gratitude lists and sharing them with a few friends every day. I was working the Steps pretty hard and the gratitude lists were a place where I tried to integrate all of the new things that were flooding into my head. Note: It was the inrush of all these new ideas that were displacing the old obsessions and thinking patterns. I could literally feel that happening as I wrote it all down.
One day in early 2021, I was feeling kind of alone and decided that maybe I should try sharing my gratitude lists. So, I set up the “@ThanksFLMS” account on Twitter and began publishing the gratitude lists anonymously. Here's an example of the early days, 6 followers (we're now at 5k!):1
Things just went from there. At some point, I began adding pictures that I would take in my various travels around New York City. I’m not a photographer, I have no training or real knowledge, I just live in a beautiful place and it turns out the phone that is in my hand all the time has a camera. I’m pretty sure I didn’t know this at the time, but identifying what you’re grateful for and then sharing it with others somehow transforms into something even better, like discovering what happens when combining peanut butter and chocolate for the first time.
So that’s “How it Works, Part I.” Gratitude. Expressing gratitude forces you to be present, to admire and respect and appreciate what is, to recognize that it is enough and that when the time comes tomorrow, the cup probably won’t be empty. Gratitude is not only a potent force on its own, capable of transforming loss, tumult and grief into learning and acceptance and healing, but it nurtures the seeds of faith and hope. I told you there would be a lot of parts, right?
Note: I didn’t have the snazzy branding back then!