Into The Distance
I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful for the bright sunlight streaming in. I’m grateful for knowing exactly where I am. I’m grateful for not always trying to figure out why. I’m grateful for mornings on the basketball court. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
This song and I go way back, and no offence to Smokey Robinson, but this is just a better version of “Tears of a Clown.”1 However, yours truly has literally been unable to stop listening to this for the last few days:
I don’t know where I heard it, but, like I said, I literally can’t stop listening to it. It makes for excellent subway/walking music. I just kind of think it’s groovy. In fact, it was my accompaniment for a pretty epic ferry ride the other night.
I love the NYC Ferry, there is a stop very near me, at 90th Street and I am a frequent traveler. I had occasion to be at a swanky rooftop thing in Williamsburg the other night and as I was planning my getaway, fixed on the idea of a lovely ferry ride home on a summer night. I got to the ferry dock a little early and started to get alarmed as I saw the sky beginning to light up with flashes of static electricity being discharged, I began to wonder whether being on a boat during a thunderstorm was a good idea.
Having spent 40 minutes on an ultra-sweaty subway platform as part of the travel to Williamsburg, I decided to brave the elements. The rain started about 22 seconds after we left the dock and it was a pretty big storm. I usually sit up top in the open air, but that was clearly not in the cards. So, I stood in the back, under a slight overhang that provided a partial shield from the torrents of rain.
I had this song on repeat and it was pretty groovy watching the boat’s wake and the gorgeous NYC skyline being lit by distant lightning.
When I disembarked, the rain had slacked off a bit and I set off for home through my beloved Carl Schurz park. It was dark and I was admittedly kind of bopping my way along the promenade, still listening to this song, and then I found out that the promenade floods after heavy rain. I found this out by stepping in water that came up over my shin. I couldn’t see whether there was a way to avoid the deep water owing to darkness. So, I started the song over and slogged through the flooded part.
I was smiling when I got to the other side, even though I was a sodden mess from the knees down. The thing that popped into my head during the slog, the thought that provoked the smile (I might have laughed out loud, I do that) was this:
You get to be the person you want to be, lead the life you want to lead, when you accept what is.
I guess that’s a pretty big catch, the “accepting what is” part. I can’t decide today to lead the life of an orthopaedic surgeon, where I ended yesterday has something to do where I can start the next day. But what I’m trying to say is that you get to define yourself, you can be what you want to be, as long as you can do what you say.
The lie in every alcoholic heart is this:
I need to be something different than who I am in order to make my way in the world.
At first, alcohol helped me make that difficult caterpillar to butterfly transformation., from who I was to who I thought I needed to be. Later on, it helped me forget about the burgeoning distance between what I knew of myself and what I had become. Maybe thinking about that distance is why I like song #2.
I’m slowly making a new life. It began by accepting what was; That I was an alcoholic who lacked the power to control my drinking. That I needed help. That I couldn’t go on the way I had been living. I was always kind of intimidated by that “rigorous honesty” stuff in the Big Book. Was “rigorous honesty” really necessary? I realized that simply meant being myself. Showing up as who I am to the world around me. This takes practice and I’m still learning what that means in the real world. Coming to understand my own boundaries has helped set me free.
So much has happened in my life in the last four years. It’s all been so improbable, so beautiful, so hard and sad sometimes. But it’s been my life that I’ve been living—finally. That’s what made me smile as I slogged through 14 inches of water the other night.
As Ferris Buelller says, “life goes fast.” I get to decide how I want to be in the world. I get to decide what I want to do and how I want to do it. As the venerated yoga-instructor Shaggy always says, “you can’t choose your outcomes, but you can choose how you experience them.” I chose to experience walking the flooded promenade in Carl Schurz park as an exercise in freedom and it unleashed exuberant feelings. In a deserted park during a thunderstorm.
The Universe finds some sneaky ways to communicate with me. I have a lot of plants and I’m pretty good with them.
bequeathed me some plants when he moved to Denver. I love having them and they are thriving. This is another bequeathed plant—and it means an awful lot to me.
Neither plant had been doing well, the cactus looked like he was a goner for sure. And then things changed, just like that. The succulent in the back began to grow again—tall and willowy and beautiful . That makes me very happy. But, improbably, the dead-looking cactus suddenly shot an arm out and is thriving, too. I’m guessing I’m more likely to be represented by the cactus.
Being me is not an exercise in blind adulation. I have a lot of flaws, make lots of mistakes, sometimes hurt people and am not always able to be true to myself. There are still things I wish for, but I know I lack the power to make them happen. What I can do is keep living my life, a day at a time, even a step at a time through a sudden-appearing lake. That’s the only way to find out what’s next for me—to wake up every morning, believing that I can be who I am and making a new life a step at a time. Maybe that’s why I like this song so much:
“We can walk into another day, into the distance.”
Happy Friday
Offence is spelled that way on purpose.