I Have Not Yet Begun to Fight

I’m grateful for easing off the gas. I’m grateful for rainy days and chances to brandish the swanky umbrella. I’m grateful for the swagger that comes from knowing myself. I’m grateful for quiet nights and gentle mornings. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

Here we are, nearly the end of November of a pretty eventful year—and not just for me. It has been a year of change and challenge for me. Lots of ups, fair number of downs, and a lot of evens. Maybe some stories didn’t end like they should, to quote a song. A lot has changed for me, and as I have noted (perhaps too many times), a lot is changing for me. I’ve been pushing very hard this year, launching a new career at a time when a lot of contemporaries are actually considering RV purchases. It’s been an incredibly rewarding year. It’s been an incredibly tiring year.

I’m finally taking my foot off the gas pedal a little bit and trying to look around. There is so much to be grateful for. My beautiful, talented, ruthlessly incisive and organized MBA daughter is having a baby—it’s a Q1 event. I’m lucky enough to get to spend Thanksgiving helping to turn a closet into a nursery. I have some ambivalence about the title, none whatsoever about the role. It’s going to be a boy and I have already devised a mini-curriculum for the lad’s unofficial education. I, of course, had an excellent role model in this regard:

My First Alcoholic

And also, as happens every few years, as everyone gathers to celebrate next Thursday, they will be inadvertently and unknowingly celebrating my birthday. I’ve been receiving pretty regular updates from my mariner son—including a surprise phone call from a hotel room in Helsinki. What he’s doing is unbelievably challenging and I couldn’t be prouder.¹ There’s an awful lot to be grateful for as I look back over 2024, and I am profoundly grateful for a year that saw me get to observe a pretty unthinkable milestone: Five years without drinking. Five years of sobriety. Five years of living the life that was meant for me.

Oh wait, the song of the week. I’ve been loving this song and listening to this song since 1979. Maybe it’s a little dark, hopefully it’s not appropriate for the times, but it is just a pretty cool song. I’m also a pretty big student of military history. My newspaper route produced the funds necessary to maintain my membership in the Military History Book Club—where they shipped a new volume every month on approval. I had the biggest WWII library at Ernest Horn Elementary for sure.

Anyway, I tend to see the world a bit through that prism, and sometimes organize my life into “campaigns,” and “offensives.” I often employed WWI-style frontal assaults on my alcoholism; they would last 30-60 days, produce a fair amount of misery and ultimately ended up gaining very little ground. Of course, Ulysses S. Grant, huge alcoholic and defender of the Union, is a personal hero.² At some level, maybe only an alcoholic could do the monstrous job Grant had to do.

Anyway, what with it being the season of giving thanks and reflections on the year that has been and soon will be “was,” I could reflect back on the last eleven months, as I slow down a little bit. And that’s where this was headed, earlier in the week. But then, weirdly, this phrase suddenly popped into my head:

I have not yet begun to fight.

A very famous saying, the story should be better known. John Paul Jones uttered these immortal words in 1779, during the Revolutionary War, in response to a request by the captain of the faster, sleeker, newer, better-armed HMS Serapis, that he strike his colors and save the rest of his crew. John Paul Jones to Captain Pearson: “F*** me, no—F8*** you!” What he actually said is way better:

I have not yet begun to fight.

Here’s what happened: Jones’ ship, the Bonhomme Richard fought the Serapis all night and suffered horrific damage and casualties—but Jones’ tenaciousness and fierceness prevailed and it was Pearson and the Serapis that surrendered to John Paul Jones and his gang of American privateers—who also seized the convoy of merchant ships that the Serapis had been unsuccessfully escorting.

I’ve come to see that this is a building time for me, it’s a time for hard work and for letting things come together the way they were meant to. The people who keep showing up in my life move me from point to unexpected point, providing sudden opportunities where none previously existed, proving the same point again and again and again:

Life unfolds the way it is meant to, when I let it.

Oh, trust me, I’m not sitting in the lotus position, sagely awaiting my fortune, I push pretty hard, but it’s in a different direction. I’m just trying to be the best version of myself that I can muster. I do the things that I think are right, even when there’s no prospect of a reward, I do the things that make me feel happy and peaceful inside. I am working to let go of my attachments to things I can’t control (and shouldn’t try). I’m building a peaceful, quiet, calm life to replace the one of chaos and regret that I lived for so many years.

There have certainly been times when I’ve seen my struggles with alcohol as a battle to be won, but that’s not how I look at it these days and that’s not why the quote really hits me. John Paul Jones arrived at a moment that was meant for him, that stood ready to be defined by his action. That’s where I think I’m arriving, too—at a moment meant for me. A moment where I’ll have a chance to follow the path I’ve been on, even though it might seem very, very challenging.

I know I employ a lot of pirate talk and metaphors. To be fair, the “Pirate Balcony” has its name not because of the occupant in the camp chair at the very end, but because it’s very narrow and resembles a gang-plank. Or, maybe there is a pirate who sits in a camp chair at the end of the balcony and watches sunrises and quiet nights and plots the next chapter of his life. And there is definitely a pirate-y attitude behind saying something like, “I have not yet begun to fight.”

I’m not fighting a war these days, that’s not what that means to me. It means, get ready, I’m shifting gears. I’m not quitting or giving up or slowing down, I feel like I’ve finally arrived at the starting line for the race I was supposed to run. I have a lot of regrets about what happened over the last many years and lots of regrets about what didn’t happen, too. But my life is no longer defined by regret, only by what’s next.

When you play pick-up basketball, you “call games,” in advance. The phrase, “I’ve got next,” means when this game is over, my team will be playing the winners for the right to stay on the court and keep playing. Maybe there’s even a martial aspect to that, taking the court and then defending it. Here’s what I know: Right now, I may be hunkered down in something of a cocoon, being transformed into what I was meant to be. That definitely fits my mood these days, feels like the right way to live. I’ve got next.

A Caterpillar Year

Things are changing, the way they always do. The world never stops spinning and I’m nowhere near ready to find a relaxing verdant pasture. I don’t know what’s coming next for me, what will happen, how I will be challenged, where I will end up. Those were the worries and concerns that dominated my thinking in the olden days and drove my drinking in the olden days. If you had asked me at this time last year, I would never have predicted this year.

A year of challenge and discovery and hard work and sitting through a fair amount of fear, apprehension and foreboding about whether I could make this all work. Well, here I am. Pretty battle-hardened after more than a decade of fighting to get sober, still pretty sad about some of the losses we endured during the fighting, proud of what I’ve accomplished and mostly grateful for not giving up. People in AA like to use the phrase “surrender” and often extoll it as a necessary step in the process of gaining sobriety. I still have enough of my old alcoholic ego to choke a bit on the word.

Sure, I gave up a lot to get here. I gave up the view of the world, and of my place in it, that had animated me for the first 57 years of my life. I had to leave a lot behind, a lot of cherished beliefs and hopes, and even dreams. I didn’t have a choice but to jettison them, they weren’t actually mine and the longer I chased them, the further from the path I strayed. What I really gave up was the conceit that I had a plan, or was capable of doing the planning.

As 19th century Prussian military strategist Helmuth Von Moltke wrote, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Maybe, Mike Tyson has the better version, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” I don’t have a masterplan or strategy, I’m not slowly revealing some intricate mechanism that will catapult me to the top of some heap. I’ve got a capacity for hard work and a willingness to look at things differently. I’ve let go of a lot of my expectations and replaced them with acceptance. I’m embracing the uncertainty in front of me, like an old friend.

Maybe I should feel scared, I’m a bit unmoored and not really sure where things might go. But I’m not. I’ve never felt more alive, more vital, more creative, more me. I didn’t just recover from the disease of alcoholism, I recovered myself—and that’s why everything is different. We united the warring factions, established a united front. We know that bad-assery always prevails over dumb-assery and we are ready.

Here are two things I know for sure as I stand on the Pirate Balcony, almost 62 years behind me, on a windy, rainy November morning, surveying the world laid out in front of me:

I’ve got next

and

I have not yet begun to fight.

Happy Friday.

1. They actually let the boy drive the ship, and not just in empty parking lots, like I restricted him to.

2. His memoirs are actually really insightful and well-written. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was his editor and publisher and secured the then-huge advance that was meant to take care of his family, as he was dying of throat cancer.