I’m grateful for a visit with my daughter. I’m grateful for the air mattress in the den. I’m grateful for what happens when I show up and be myself. I’m grateful for feelings of peace and calm even when things are hard. I’m grateful for my own coffee. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
I made the decision earlier this week that the sotw was going to be a Doobies Brothers song. I realize this starts to make it this whole enterprise different than just a “song of the week, but the die is cast. I think my favorite Doobie Brothers album is “Living on the Fault Line,” but I like pretty much all of those songs, so choosing one was very hard. So, I didn’t.
If you’re someone of roughly my vintage, and you like bands like Steely Dan and the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers, you’re going to be confronted by this difficult question:
Where do I stand on the topic of Michael McDonald?
I’m very much of two minds on this topic. I agree with the viewpoint expressed in the “40 Year Old Virgin,” working in a store where the Michael McDonald whole soul thing is playing on all of the tv’s non-stop, and at top volume? No thanks. However, “Living on the Fault Line,” is a great album and it’s all him. He’s all over Steely Dan cuts and mostly on songs I like and the same with the Eagles. I guess where you lose me is that everything seems so very dramatic and hard. There’s a time and place for that, but on a daily gratitude list?
Before we go any farther:
This episode features two randomly-selected sponsees talking about the First Step and they even did some of the writing exercises. As I was saying earlier this week, I think working the First Step is not just about acknowledging that whole,
”yup, turns out I’m an alcoholic” thing, but I think it is an appropriate place to think more generally about where one’s life is headed. As someone smarter than me once said,
“Never waste a good crisis.”
Meaning that the low points, the difficult times, are pretty good opportunities for taking stock of things and figuring out which direction to go. I read this great book years ago, “Designing Your Life,” by two Stanford professors who take the principles of good design and apply it to, well, designing a good life. And that is the idea here, it’s not just about not drinking, it’s about building a whole new life.
We alcoholics spend our drinking careers trying to fill that hole we all feel, and I think sometimes, the approach to sobriety is to fill that hole with other nonsense. The point is to be happy, to be productive, to be vibrant, alive, have fun. Not just mourn the loss of alcohol and grimly replace the drinking with “sober activities.” It’s like trying to bake with egg whites.1 I think the exercise is not just filling up that hole on a daily basis, I think it’s time to build a gaudy McMansion, maybe a miniature Graceland, where that hole used to be. I’m not really interested in tending the grave of my drinking.
I frequently tell the sponsees that the point of this whole exercise is not about drinking or using, it’s just building a happy, sustainable life. As a sponsor, I’m not in charge of telling them what that is, I can only share what I did, the kinds of questions I asked, the ideas I had and what happened to me as I did it. I think it’s critical to remember that there is only requirement for AA membership—a desire to stop drinking. What every person does with that, is up to every person.
So, I think the First Step is an opportunity to start doing the inventory work that is going to be the focus of Steps Four and Five. Sobriety involves extensive work on one’s self, as long as the hood is open. I think part of the First Step should be looking not just at the drinking or using, but the whole equation of life—because that’s what is going to need to change.
One approach would be to divide one’s life into segments: whatever seems appropriate in your life—Work, family, relationships, health, fun—and then start assessing where you are in each of those segments. What is good, what is bad, what might be fixed, what needs to be accepted. The fun and play category is a really important one, I think. It’s very easy to get trapped in the whole “trudging the trail of happy destiny,” especially in early sobriety.
I don’t want to “trudge” anywhere
Daniel found some sober buddies and they started a band. They hold a weekly “meeting,” that is actually a rehearsal. They play gigs in bars. I think it’s about the coolest thing and I think that’s the real aim of this whole enterprise: Using sobriety to find happiness and joy. They don’t just sit around and grimly recount their sober struggles. They jam.
When people are working the First Step, it’s often pretty close in time to the shipwreck. We know the feeling of washing up on the beach, spent, exhausted, alone and wondering what’s next. The First and Second Steps are about letting the fear go and replacing it with wonder,
“I made it, I washed up on shore.”
At this point, you can get comfortable and sit on the beach and carefully bide your time thinking sober thoughts, maybe even sharing them with other shipwreck survivors, looking out to sea wistfully, wondering when that big ship of happiness is going to come into view.2 Or you can get up off that beach and go build the magnificent hut the Howell’s had on Gilligan’s Island.
Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. was a general in World War II. He is said to have been one of the oldest men on Utah Beach on D-Day and one of only two generals. He had fought for the right to be on the beach with his men that day, no one wanted someone like him to be on the casualty list. They landed on the wrong part of the beach, far away from their objectives, disorganized, confused and under withering fire, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. calmly pointed towards the beach exits, and said,
We’ll start the war here.
Right where we are. But the idea isn’t to find a way to stay here, marooned on the Island of the Freshly Sober. That’s what the First Step is, figuring out exactly where you are and beginning the process of getting to where you need to go. Teddy Roosevelt, Jr. got the Medal of Honor for what he did that day.3 You just need to get sober. They both take unbelievable amounts of real courage.
This doesn’t need to be a war. You can choose whatever metaphor you’d like. The beach thing is optional, too. Recovery is the journey back to yourself, so you’ll need to figure out the terrain. I know I approached the idea of sobriety like a part of me was dying. I was exactly wrong. It was the start of living. Of course, it began with that First Step.
I made that up—is that a thing?
Did I just spin out a “Love Boat”reference.
Posthumously, he died of a heart attack in France later that summer.