Seeking and Finding

I’m grateful for a night of cooking. I’m grateful for not knowing what’s next. I’m grateful for knowing things will be okay. I’m grateful for loving and kind people. I’m grateful for what I have to learn. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

My best friend growing up, Mark H, loved the Alan Parsons Project. We’d listen to that album over and over. Mark was kind of an Alan Parsons purist and the fact that I liked this song provided fertile ground for ridicule. He’d sing along in a very squeaky falsetto voice and look meaningfully at me while he sang the best lines, “The sun in your eyes made some of the lies worth believing.”

That is a great line. We were 10th graders without any meaningful contact with the opposite sex, and frankly, the idea of being lied to mercilessly by a girl sounded like an acceptable concession. I was always ready to take one for the team, if that’s what it took. Like most of the sotw’s, there’s not a story attached to this one and I’m pretty sure I haven’t been in this situation before. I think the thing I identify with in this song is the sense of resignation and sadness. I know a lot about living with something/someone who was slowly killing me, poisoning me a glass (and hopefully one of those cute little carafes, too) at a time.¹

If you’re forced to listen to the whole thing, as I always was, there is a long electronic, very slowly building instrumental thing. It’s still played at a fair number of NBA arenas and at events. Don’t get me wrong, it can be cool in the right circumstances, but the part that always just hit me is the way this song just starts out with the very spare keyboard playing mournful descending notes, the kind of relentless guitar behind it. It felt like realizing something very sad, that kind of stuff really resonated with me, despite the aforementioned lack of romantic involvement.

To be honest, I think I thought this song was about me. Me seeing how false I already was. Me seeing that I was already far away from where I was supposed to be. Anyway, this is a really good song to play on quiet late night walks. In the pre-Walkman days, I would take those long walks playing songs like this in my head, maybe even softly singing if I was sure I was alone.² I’m not sure what the great sadness was in my life back in the 1977-78 school year, but this song sure tapped into it.

I was listening to this song not so long ago, and somehow the thing I began thinking about is the difference between seeking and finding. As long as my life was defined by “seeking,” well, it was a shit-show. When I say “seeking,” what I mean is looking for something pre-determined. I’ve spent a lot of my life doing this, and not with good results. First, I’m not great at finding things. When I was a kid, my mom would send me to the little grocery store down the street. I rode my bike and had a list. I’d stand in front of the spice rack for roughly 8 minutes searching for the nutmeg. I literally could not pick things out, I’d look up and down randomly fixing on different containers, but unable to systematically scan from top to bottom. Then it would be on to the tomato sauce/paste maze that awaited me.³ I have the same struggle today and will spend minutes in front of the coffee display trying to find the Vienna Roast.

The point of this, when I’m seeking, when I’m on a mission to find one specific thing, I have a really difficult time finding what I’m looking for and I, for sure, miss everything that isn’t on that list.

I look back on my younger self, I wonder about so many of the choices. They seem reflective of a foreign-being running the show, I have a hard time thinking I would make the same choices that I did back then. Especially knowing the hidden part of the equation behind those choices. I’m a quiet, introverted, somewhat insecure person who loves long quiet walks and reading and listening to music. I decided to be a litigator and trial lawyer. The problem with the seeking in those days was that I wasn’t seeking something that “was,” I was mostly looking for something that wasn’t: Specifically, wasn’t me.

Getting sober and moving to New York during the pandemic was the opposite of seeking. I had hit the end of the road, the edge of the map and moving to New York to start over seemed like the best of the available options. I didn’t know what I would find there.

I think that was the difference.

For the first time in my life, I had stepped off of what I thought was the path. There was very little that was certain about my life in those days of early sobriety. I didn’t know what I was going to be doing from day to day. My career was stalled, I had no idea where that would go. I had no idea where I should go. Those were the days of waking up every morning with the idea that today is the day when I’d finally be swallowed by the void I felt in my stomach. There were endless walks and all-night sessions of watching “Office” reruns.

One thing that was happening, as a consequence of going to meetings and talking to my sponsor and reading the Big Book, I was beginning to see that the problem had never really been my drinking, it had been my conception of the world and my understanding of my place in that world.

The younger me had the sense that the Universe worked by throwing out chances and opportunities to the hard-working and fortunate. The problem was that the Universe threw out those chances and opportunities a little like this:

Those chances came out hot and very unpredictably. They didn’t always make sense, but I felt compelled to try and catch them. When I failed, or the thing turned out to actually be a wrench, I took it as a sign that I had blown yet another opportunity. The thing I knew was that the Universe didn’t keep handing out chances to be happy. If you don’t grab this, well, you’ll probably be very sorry.

I dealt with all of those missed opportunities, those little losses, by drinking. A lot and very frequently. It may sound hokey, but it was the work around the first three Steps that changed my view of the world. I stopped seeing my Higher Power as a wrench-chucking Patches O’Houlihan (pro tip: never ask him if something is “necessary”). Instead, I started to see a force that works to bind us together in ways I didn’t expect or understand, that forced me to see and learn things that it turned out I really needed to see and learn. I didn’t see or learn all of those things on the first pass.

I came to understand the real point of the exercise is the learning. When I stopped seeing my life as an exercise in walking the plank with as much insouciant swagger as possible (10x Old Spice Swagger), I came to see that happiness and peace and serenity came less from accomplishing and more from the learning. As long as I was only looking for a jar of nutmeg on the spice rack, everything was a blur.

Clarity came when I stopped looking.

What came after that first desolate New York winter was a real spring. I feel like I finally took root and began to grow. I really didn’t have an idea what was going to happen from day-to-day. I had no idea what the next (last?) 25 years have in store for me. There have been a lot of really hard things, the comfort I draw is that pain seems to accompany true learning. The things that I didn’t want to happen often did, but as I discovered the purpose of the pain, I found peace.

I’m not a leaf on a stream. I have an obligation to be myself and show up as honestly as I can. The only expectation that I hold is that whatever happens next, whatever finds me, is the thing that is probably supposed to happen. Please note, the “Supposed to Happen” thing is not like one of those really unfair shortcuts in CandyLand, it only takes one to the next moment, and so on and so forth.

I’m not fatalistic, I just believe that life is about being open to whatever comes next. I also know that when I haven’t learned what I need to, well, the Universe has the tendency to keep throwing me that same pitch until I learn what to do with it. As long as I was the one leading the “seeking,” what I would “find” was kind of fore-ordained. I had no choice but to embrace the uncertainty that accompanied hitting the bottom, I had no idea it would lead me on the journey it has. I had no idea that it was possible to feel this kind of calm and peace, even on the hard days.

I don’t know what the future holds, or even later today. But I know that once I stopped seeking, I began finding things of real value, the things that provide meaning in my life. It turns out those things are everywhere, the trick is not looking so hard.

Happy Friday.

1. If you’d like a more definite version of that sentence, feel free to substitute (drinking/me).

2. Other songs on that playlist would include “I Can’t Tell You Why” and “Desperado.” I did love the Eagles, too.

3. I think these might be similar to ADHD symptoms.