Not Seeking and Finding

I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful for getting things done. I’’m grateful for the plate appearances. I’m grateful for what’s been granted me. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

This has almost been the sotw several times. I’m not sure I can tell you why it never made it over the top, to the milk and honey of the promised land of the sotw archive.¹ But now it has and things do somehow feel different. Speaking of things that are different—we are revving up to re-boot the podcast. That’s right Breakfast with an Alcoholic is about to make it’s return. Prepare the garments and palm fronds.²

I can hear the collective whoosh, the excited gathering of breath, the first thing that tumbles out of your mouth,

“Is it going to be pretty much like it was before?”

Thanks for the enthusiasm,. “Yes and also better,” is my official answer. We’re changing the format slightly, and instead of featuring interviews with interesting and random alcoholics (although I would love to do more of that), it’s going to be me and Daniel and

Sean

(they are sponsees) going through how we got sober. Not like a minute by minute approach, but we’re starting at the beginning and we’re going to work our way through both the Steps and the Big Book.

I don’t want anyone to faint, but we’ve already recorded the first episode and it could be available to your listening ears next week.³ If you’d like a reminder of the olden days:

Breakfast with an Alcoholic: Episode 14

Anyway, our plan is to march through the steps of our recovery and show precisely how we recovered. That, after all, is the whole point of the Big Book. Those old-time alcoholics didn’t f*** around or mince words. The second sentence in the Foreword to the First Edition:

“To show other alcoholics precisely how we have recovered is the main purpose of this book.”

So, that’s our plan, too. We’re going to wend our way though the Book and some Step work. The secret part of my plan is it’s going to be a little like getting sober again for the three of us, and I heartily invite you, the listening public, to play along at home. Digression: I have spoken often and achingly about my dream job, the thing I was built to do, the career that would make the best use of all of my diverse talents:

Being a game show host.

I’m not going to get carried away here, but I have the sport coat collection to outdo Monty Hall (please don’t ask if you don’t know who he is) and way more snarky and cutting comments. Also, I think he might have died. Anyway, the current version is super lame and they are nice to the contestants and sorry when they get zonked—which misunderstands the whole genius of this game show. It’s hard to find out that the ‘70s were just a much more clever and sophisticated era—because it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Anyway, one of the things disappointed contestants received as a “consolation prize,” was the home version of “Let’s Make a Deal.” This made no sense to me. How could there be a version of “Let’s Make a Deal” in my house? Were my parents going to let me trick them out of valuable prizes while issuing clever, cutting zingers? Not really. I didn’t get my first blue blazer until high school, so I wasn’t even ready.

Anyway, what I’m suggesting is that you, the alcoholic or the loved one of an alcoholic or if you’re just interested in what people are talking about when they talk about “working the steps” and such, well you can follow along at home and do your own work. We’re going to share our work around the Steps, including working through a 4th Step inventory—so buckle up for that. We’re also going to repeatedly invite participation, by you, the listening public. Meaning that we could answer your questions or even share things you have written…

Our first stop will be the First Step and we’re going to focus on Chapter One of the Big Book, “Bill’s Story.” We’re not going to read the whole book together, but we will probably read some parts together. There is definitely something to reading the book aloud with other alcoholics that generates a deeper level of engagement and meaning. I’m not sure how that works, but it works. Ask an alcoholic who has tried it.

As I’m going to be mentioning frequently, I’ll be celebrating five years of sobriety later this month and that has me reflecting on how I got sober and why, after all of the failed attempts, a decade of futility, did it finally work? This is not hyperbole, the thing that changed things for me was this:

Reading the book aloud together with other alcoholics.

Now, we run our own little AA meeting on Tuesday nights and we read the stories in the back of the book together. It sounds like about the worst thing you could be forced to do; like having to re-attend 8th grade geometry. But it’s not. The words somehow hit differently when they come out of the mouths of other alcoholics and the discussions that follow are always more revelatory and real than a lot of what gets talked about at meetings.

This is all cart before the horse, cloaks before the donkey, until TBD gets the episode edited—and this is a laborious but welcome process. Anyway, stay tuned, Breakfast with an Alcoholic, Season 3 (we need a catchy title for Season 3, like “The Reckoning”) will be invading your personal space soon.

I make notes during the week of particularly interesting insights or potentially brilliant comments. Then I sit down and they simply make no sense. Some of them are song lyrics that suddenly popped to mind:

The very thing we seek is the one thing we can’t find

This, from a very old Vanessa Williams song, suddenly popped into my head on an early morning:

This is a truly bizarre video—what with the very creepy axe being featured very prominently and actually the sun never, ever, ever goes around the moon. If that happened, it probably means the universe ended about 15 minutes ago, and shit is about to get very real. Not the point, however, that line, the thing we seek is the one thing we can’t find. There’s something to that.

I spend a lot of time navel-gazing and trying to understand what changed for me and how it happened. I do that because I’d like to be able to share the secret with other people and also, whatever it is that pushed me over the top, well, I’d like to do more of that. The Big Book and Steps 10, 11 and 12 make it clear that continued sobriety requires continued work and adherence to the principles that brung you here.

One of the things that brought me here was giving up on my own notions of how my life was supposed to go. I know that sounds extreme, trust me, I’m a lawyer working in a law firm, so it’s not like I’ve gone off to the Unabomber cabin to live off the land. I mean I stopped trying to decide in advance how things were going to go, what things meant, what happiness would require. I stopped seeking, and that’s when I began finding.

It’s not that I gave up on wanting answers to those questions. I simply gave up on insisting on my own answers. I write about courage being the process of being guided by the heart. The problem is following one’s heart can be tricky, it’s not always clear why we’re taking this particular route, and some of the stopovers don’t seem to make a ton of sense. But living this way, and being grateful for what gets served up, is at the core of my recovery, and is the foundation of my continued sobriety.

I used to listen to Tears of a Clown in the years immediately following my divorce. I’m not sure who or what it was I was mourning, but that was the persona I adopted for a while. There was more than a little truth to it; that decade was a very dark and hard time—punctuated occasionally by a brilliant smile and maybe true love. It’s still kind of hard to think about that time. There was so much fear in my life. I felt completely lost and never thought I would find the way out.

Deep down, even when I got to read “How it Works” at the DuPont Circle Club, I believed I was never going to get sober. I simply found it impossible to believe that I could live my life without drinking. See what I mean? It was my own beliefs that held me back the most; the lies I told myself were the strongest bonds holding me in alcoholic captivity. The answers I was seeking took me to exactly the wrong places.

Reading the book and working the steps changed that. Seeing that I was a part of an amazing world, where mysterious and miraculous things happened, often involving pancakes. The trick was, I had to let those miracles happen. When I say things like “life is a miracle,” I don’t mean it in some treacly, “oh, come watch the sunrise with me!”⁴

I mean it in the sense that wonderful and unexpected things happen, when I let them. Sure, there are times when I feel alone and lost, when I wish things were a different way, when I wonder what could have happened? But here I am, living an improbably happy life, walking through doors I didn’t know would open, doing things I didn’t know I could do, living a life I didn’t know I could lead.

And then I realize all of this was in front of me the whole time. You know the story about God talking to me in the Equinox locker room; the command was

Do the thing you don’t know how to do.

That’s what is different about my life. I’m doing the things I didn’t know how to do. I stopped seeking the answers and let them begin to find me. I let my life be guided by love and acceptance. But the biggest thing? The thing I didn’t know how to do the most? Yeah, I’m doing that, too. I’m finally living the life I was meant to lead.⁵

Happy Friday.

1. Is there such a thing? No. Is there likely to be such a thing? Not soon.

2. The part I never got about this story was where he entered Jerusalem triumphantly, riding a donkey?

3. Once we start releasing the new season of podcasts, I’ll be able to convince myself that every time I see someone smiling with their earbuds in, that they are listening to the witty banter of Breakfast with an Alcoholic.

4. Well, maybe I do.

5. Also, the podcast was part of this, so you should definitely listen.