I can’t tell you how great my Breakfast with Olis was—well, I guess you could get a pretty good idea if you were to listen to this:
In addition to actually having these breakfasts, I listen to the audio quite a few times during the editing process.1 What I noticed as I listened to Olis talk about her love affair with Alcoholics Anonymous was how many simply amazing things she threw off casually. Like this:
It’s the juxtaposition of the sunlight to the darkness that makes the sunlight so magnificent.
As an alcoholic, I hear something like that and it helps me make sense of a lot of lost years. When I think back on the ten years I spent desperately trying to get sober, I don’ t remember a lot of sunny days. I’m sure the sun did shine at times during that time, but when your entire life is consumed by either finding a drink or trying to avoid that drink, everything just seems kind of gray.
In the Book of Genesis, the story of creation starts:
Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night.2
Genesis 1:3-5
Interestingly, God didn’t banish the darkness; instead, it’s an integral part of creation.3 I think it’s exactly the same for us alcoholics: Integrating the light and the dark into one sustainable, manageable life is the point and the challenge of sobriety. Olis put her finger on it when she talked about her love of the blues. When you acknowledge the pain and the darkness in your own life and then share that authentically with others, it somehow gets transformed into a light that can help guide others out of their darkness. Doing that requires that I look at my own darkness differently—it’s no longer just a sordid, shameful, hurtful chapter, but an integral part of who I am and what I went through. When I share that with others there’s a chance that someone will hear it and maybe identify with a part of it and think, “if that guy could get sober, I probably could, too.”4
That integration is at the core of the the famed AA “Promises:”
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. The feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Big Book, p. 83-84
Pretty heady stuffy, the key is not disappearing the past, but finding a positive role for it. The other thing I always point out about the Promises is that they are the consequence of internal change. Sad to say that there is no magical sobriety elf who bestows “cash and prizes” after appropriate sobriety intervals. Olis hit this nail squarely on the head when she said the hardest lesson of sobriety was also the greatest gift: The realization that the problem is me! That’s precisely at the core of the famous passage on Acceptance on page 417 of the Big Book:
And acceptance is the answer to all of my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life is unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God’s world by mistake…unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy.
Olis and I agree that as long as the problem is someone else, something else, there’s not much we can do about it, and we’re not likely to stay sober.5 But once we acknowledge that we are the problem we have just opened ourselves up to the solution. It’s pretty nifty how that works, right?
Olis is not only dead-right about the core beliefs of AA, she also has excellent taste in music. When you listen to the podcast, she tells you she’s a “Wish You Love” girl, and that is a great song:
In addition to Sam Cooke, she loves Billy Holiday, Dinah Washington, Lou Rawls, Ray Charles:
Excellent choices.
Like I said, I think Miles Davis’ Someday My Prince Will Come is a beautiful, poignant album. It’s almost like you can hear the foreknowledge of how bad things will get, how much he’ll lose to addiction, or maybe that’s just me:
While I’m feeling sentimental, I love Bill Evans and here’s a sad song that I’ve loved for a long time:
Olis said that touching the sad, dark places turns out to be a source of comfort and of strength. Music is one of the things that helps me integrate those parts of my life into the current version of me. I guess that means that music is one of things that helps keep me sober—so I’ve got that going for me now, which is nice.6
Thanks for Letting Me Share
Hahaha, yes these are edited.
I usually prefer the King James Version, but I’m pretty fond of the Oxford Revised Standard Version these days and not just because it uses a lot of semi-colons; it also has footnotes.
Yes, I know that the light/dark thing also has to do with orbiting the sun and rotating on our axis, etc. I took Astronomy in college, but it was at 8:50 am and involved sitting in a darkened auditorium looking at slides a lot of the time and I was a budding young alcoholic…
For sure, you can.
This is perfectly and cleverly illustrated by this highly underrated passage on page 408: “I had sent her to four consecutive psychiatrists, and not one of them had gotten me sober.” That’s funny.
Yes, that is a Bill Murray/Caddyshack reference.