I’m grateful when things feel like they’re coming together. I’m grateful for seeing things the way they are. I’m grateful for other alcoholics. I’m grateful for a beautiful morning and coffee. I’m grateful to be sober today.
I have previously announced my intention to be more programmatic and less, whatever this usually is, last week was very heavily focused on Step One (if you didn’t notice):
Is it Step Twoseday? Maybe. Will Taco Bell sue me if that becomes part of the standard idiom? Hope so, it would be good publicity. I’ve written elliptically about a little of the tumult that amounts to my day-to-day life. In many ways, the last few months have been a challenging and difficult time as I reorient myself, re-invent myself and try to build a life for the go-forward. There are some pretty solid, objective reasons for me to be fearful on a daily basis. I remember the old me and how fear would bathe me; it would actually make me feel claustrophobic, like I was being enveloped in a crushing, sticky web. Of course, I drank to try and escape that little prison.
But here’s the thing now: I wake up in the morning and it’s not the crushing fear or dread that I notice first—it’s the color of the sunrise, the gorgeous silence of early mornings as I pad around and make coffee. My mornings are suffused with peace, not fear. There are lots of challenges ahead of me today, but what I feel is peace and calm and a positive, get it done attitude. Seriously, Sting had this feeling exactly pegged in “Brand New Day:”
The river’s wide, we’ll swim across.
As I’ve mentioned before, this is a change for me. Of course, I attribute much of this to the outlook change generated by writing a daily gratitude list.1 Starting the day by noticing the things that are right does seem to set things moving in the right direction.2 If you need more of a movie back-drop to set the stage for where we are going, then let’s use one of my personal favorites: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.3
We join our heroes after this hysterically funny scene:
If you need a metaphor for “coming in,” I think this works. Anyway, having miraculously survived the fall, and now bobbing along in the river, breathing that delicious air and giddy at the escape, our very pirate-y, bank robbing friends have to confront this question:
Where the f*** are we going?
At the end of the First Step, we’re shivering on the bank, safe, but tired for sure, and still smarting from the grim realization that the life we were living was a shambles and required a very narrow, and maybe not repeatable, escape. Here’s the Second Step beacon of light:
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
This is, of course, the Step-ified version of Bill W’s gob-smacked reaction to his dinner with alcoholic friend, Ebby Thacher:
It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.
Big Book, p. 12
Last night marked another installment of the Tour de AA, wherein me and the sponsees attend meetings throughout New York City. Last night, our stop was the venerable Rhinelander AA meeting:
It was a good meeting, but the best part of these outings is hearing what the sponsees have to say. I love listening to them share at meetings. I’ve made the joke more than once,
“Are we sure we wanted to get this sober?”
Hahaha. But that’s kind of a serious question. I remember going to AA meetings in the early days and thinking, “is all of this really necessary?” The answer: Maybe. Recovery is finding the path back to yourself, so that’s a question that everyone necessarily has to answer for themselves. That’s the work of the Second and Third Steps—figuring out what you need to believe to get and stay sober.
It is worth pointing out that while we addicts and alcoholics may suffer from the same disease, there are so many varieties and types of that disease, that what works for one person may not work for someone else. I think the greatest sin that gets committed over and over in AA rooms is the declaration of the one true path. This error gets committed when someone, who may or may not have read the Big Book and worked the Steps, indicates that anyone who really wants to get sober should do exactly what they did. Not to cheapen things, but if you were to think of sobriety like a coloring book, this would be like someone waving around the page showing how they colored in the one with the cute puppies in the flower garden and insisting that the newcomers color their page exactly the same way. Often suggesting that anything else amounts to “doing more research.” 4
For someone like me, the question was always, “how much of this do I have to actually believe?” And here’s the tricky part, once you start believing a little of it, it’s hard to not believe more. As I mentioned a few hundred words ago, I wake up with a preternatural calm most days. Just like that night in the sober house about three years ago, while there is a lot to be objectively fearful and worried about, once you start to believe there might be a Power greater than one’s self that might be able to help me get sober, it’s kind of hard to not be drawn further downstream.
Here’s where I am today. I believe there is a Power greater than myself and that said Power helped restore me to sanity. I have been working to turn my will and life over to the care of said Power. This is a complicated, operationally focused endeavor that really requires much more than the breezily-stated “made a decision” language of Step Three. Turning one’s will and life over seems to be a daily, maybe even hourly, thing and requires pretty constant attention to the here and now. Which is kind of the point.
Here’s the real problem: Once you start believing that there is a Power greater than oneself, you quickly realize (I did) that said Power has this thing about how the things that are supposed to happen actually need to happen. This is where gratitude and acceptance come in, by the way. Some people say sobriety is “living life on life’s terms.” For me, sobriety has been coming to terms with the fact that my Higher Power insists that the things that are supposed to happen, actually do happen. I can delay, postpone, avoid things a little. But gravity is gravity, right? Remember this guy?
I finally saw the task in front of me was to accept and learn from the things that are apparently supposed to happen. I still have a lot of responsibility, acceptance is not just sitting back and waiting for the Publisher’s Clearinghouse knock on the door. It is actively pursuing life with the knowledge that I am not in charge, I am not in the destiny-making business anymore. I feel lots of fear and uncertainty every day, everyone does. What’s different now? I started believing there might be a plan to all of this madness. The more I considered this, the more I gave into this idea, the more peace I felt. The more I considered this, the further I got from drinking.
I still sometimes ask the BMIU, “was that really necessary?” Those are not questions the BMIU tends to answer. The answer I’m going to get, comes every morning when I watch the sun come up from the Pirate Balcony. When kind, beautiful people show up to take me to the next chapter of my life. When things that used to seem like petty coincidences get this miracle-tinted filter applied and look something like this:
Here’s the problem: Once you start thinking this way, My Higher Power makes it really, really hard not to think this way some more, to believe just a little more, to let the idea take root that there just might be something like a plan unfolding. My Higher Power isn’t big on answering questions explicitly, but he throws out a lot of hints that there might just be a way to stay sober and live a beautiful, happy life.
Did I mention I found exactly four pennies on Sunday?
One of the things I love most is when people send me their gratitude lists. A civilian friend of mine sent her gratitude list to me on my anniversary—that was a really lovely thing. I always re-post them on Twitter and would obviously do the same here. If you wanted to…
If you’re more of an experiential learner, and things like open flames are educational opportunities, here’s an experiment. For a week, within 15 minutes of getting up, list all of the shitty stuff. Actually, don’t do that—I tried that for like 10 years and it really doesn’t get you anywhere you want to go.
For everyone born after 1989: yes, it’s more than 90 minutes long. You should still see it.
I feel like the Big Book talks about ego and control-type issues somewhere.
This was especially excellent today, T.B.D. "Turning one’s will and life over seems to be a daily, maybe even hourly, thing and requires pretty constant attention to the here and now. Which is kind of the point." Yes.