I’m grateful for sinking feelings. I’m grateful for intuition and reflection. I’m grateful for letting things happen. I’m grateful for bits and pieces coming together. I’m grateful for patience and faith. I’m grateful to be sober today.
In case you missed it, yesterday was the birthday of none other than our own,
!!I was gearing up to speak at a meeting the other night and was thinking about how I would try to sum up the real changes in my life between the olden days and now. I know I approach things very differently, but how do you describe that? Something in that thinking process put my brain in alcoholic Viewmaster mode. Of course, you probably don’t know what I mean:
This was an updated, made-of-plastic, old-time stereograph from the 1870’s sold to kids in the 1960’s as something cool and exciting. Yes, there were kind of 3-D images of things like the Moon or Old Faithful. You’d cycle through the images on the disk by depressing the trigger on the right.1
Anyway, I started seeing a whole bunch of images from my life. My life was sort of passing by my eyes, I guess, but I was sitting pretty comfortably in the Living Room. Current insecurities are great triggers for “why didn’t that turn out?” types of thoughts. I had a whole cavalcade of things I had accomplished, that maybe could even be considered objectively successful, and none of them met my expectations. I started to realize that all of the chapters of my life, even the ones with really amazing stuff in the middle, all ended with this bittersweet, resentful-ish:
That could have been better.
That thought can take a lot of different forms. It can be the kernel of the resentment against someone who stood in the way, or didn’t stick around. It could be the seed of shame and self-hatred, for not succeeding the way other people would have, if presented with the same possibility, the same pitch to hit. It was for me, the unbearable sense that if only I had done things differently, worked a little harder or for someone else, my life today would be somehow better.
I’m not unique here, I feel like some of you might have had feelings like that from time-to-time. Why did they get that? Why didn’t I get that? Stuff like that.
As I kept right-clicking (invented by the ViewMaster?), it gave me the sense that I was watching a really tragic story, told one kind of garish, fuzzy “3-D ish” still photo at a time. But that’s not my life. Yes, a lot of bad stuff happened and people were very hurt, and part of this is coming to terms with that in a way that doesn’t reduce life to sackcloth and ashes, self-beatings or writing passive-aggressive, humble-brag, gratitude lists.2
As I let my eyes unfocus, the Viewmaster image got even fuzzier, but I actually started to see what was driving my unhappy view of all of those slides wasn’t connected to the actual events, it was the narrative my alcoholic brain imposed on the events of my life. That narrative was my brain’s answer to what was pretty much pure fear bubbling around down there at some age while my brain was developing. I don’t mean to suggest that my experience growing up or developing emotionally is super significant or different than anyone else’s, or similar to to anyone else’s. I’m just starting to see how I learned to think the way I do.
I can see that my way of looking at the world around me depended more than a little on the story I was telling myself. That doesn’t make a ton of sense, I know. There’s the old joke about blindfolded people feeling various parts of an elephant and guessing what kind of animal it is. No one gets it right, but, at some level, they don’t really get it wrong. There is a nugget of fact that is enough to get the old Hamster Wheel spinning to create the rest of the story. Weirdly, much like a prompt to an alcoholic ChatGPT might yield.3
That’s what changed. I stopped believing that self-generated narrative. Instead of deciding what things were and meant immediately, maybe it was better to wait and see what happens. What unfolds, what I might learn. This is not some Hakuna Matata thing, this is profoundly uncomfortable for someone who has been pretty self-directed and pretty willing to charge hills upon request. But that is the nub right there:
Mr. Hill-Taker Required Liquid Courage
Here’s what I learned: It takes even more courage to do the best I can, to do the next right thing and then wait and see how things unfold. It was never about taking the hill, that just led to another hill.
The ViewMaster of my life (so far) has some pretty amazing, appalling, funny, sad, successful, improbable, beautiful, full-of-love and broken hearted moments—all co-existing and all roughly like everyone else’s. The things that happened, were they “meant to happen?” Seriously? They did happen and the lessons propelled me to the next thing and the next thing and now here. As long as I saw the chapters of my life as a series of objectives that could be graded and dissected, well, I graded and dissected them and found that adding alcohol lessened the bitter aftertaste of self-determined failure, that things could have been better.
I work hard and don’t accept that things are always just going to be the same. I don’t think acceptance and turning life over to a Higher Power is like an eternal summer afternoon in the hammock. But the only objective I try to consider is where do I go and apply myself to be of maximum service—how do I do the next right thing and await the next right thing happening? And then how do I recognize what is the “next right thing.” That can be pretty scary and it definitely makes the faith muscles sore after a while, but it’s the soreness that evidences building real strength.
You might have considered me a “hard charger,” back in the day. To be honest, I don’t think the effort has dropped off too much, even considering my advanced age. These days, even when things are objectively hard, they feel light to me, because I know deep down, all I have to do is my best. I finally realized the orders to keep taking those hills weren’t coming from the guy at the top of the food chain, he’s got a very different approach to things and he never really says things like “Charge!!.” So, I stopped, too.
Note to younger brothers: When you are staring intently into the Viewmaster, you are kind of blind to a lot of dangerous possibilities. How long do you really want to be looking at that? Maybe it’s safer if I have it now?
Signed,
An Older Brother
Why are you looking at me like that?
Now there’s an idea….
Great post! And I'm ashamed to be old enough to remember the ViewMaster.... although I wasn't (quite) around in the 60s. Such a great metaphor!