SUNDAY GRATITUDE EXTRAVAGANZA: Christmas Trees and Hope
| Christmas Trees and Hope | The Sober Library: Field Sobriety Guide No. 01 | From the TFLMS Archives: | Much, Much More |
I’m grateful for a rainy, dreary morning. I’m grateful for a pretty good night of sleep. I’m grateful for what hangs in those clouds overhead. I’m grateful for more coffee. I’m grateful for seeing everything can be a beginning. I’m grateful to be sober today.
For the Alcoholic/Addict in Your Life (it is officially the holidays):
There have been days when I could rightly be accused of going too heavy on the links. I think the thing that may be worse than the sheer number of links is the content.1 We now find ourselves amidst a sea of buttons and, lest I forget, holiday cheer. The “Mystery Button” is a button and is intended to promote “holiday cheer,” so that should be enough. But in the event it isn’t, then pushing the above mystery button will open up another way to communicate with that person who just doesn’t get it, and needs to. “It” being this fabulous newsletter, of course. What were you thinking?
Shoot, in the profusion of buttons, well, I got a little mixed up. One of these you should definitely push and the other well, maybe not. Is this a bizarre behavior test? Not yet. Better question, how will you know the correct answer without pushing both?
I am often accused of talking too much about the weather, however when one writes a gratitude list each day, well, I’ll be honest, the weather is a very necessary crutch. But before you begin to doubt the sincerity of my weather-related platitudes gratitudes, I actually believe most of them. I do have a special affinity for cold, dreary weather, perhaps fostered by:
A love of the Safety Patrol rain slickers in the 6th grade
An early and unexplained fascination with umbrellas
A prior life as a Labrador Retriever
The fact that rain tended to keep people off the streets, thereby making things much quieter and more manageable
For whatever reason, days like this usually promote a sense of let’s get things done. There is usually lots of coffee on mornings like this, a certain genre of music and I can often be pretty productive. Also, I love the way New York looks in the rain. I mean, it’s beautiful on sunny days, especially in the Fall. But dark, gloomy New York is New York at its best. I think.
Writing a sentence like that is actually pretty illuminating, I think it definitely expresses what I feel about where it is that I washed up and now call home. And while it might suggest that the writer of that sentence has a slightly depressive outlook on the world, that’s less the point. The point is more about coming to see everything as a continuum, a process that is still unfolding. Meaning, rather than seeing days as independent dots on a calendar, capable of being judged and reviewed on a stand-alone basis, they are a long domino chain of quasi-inevitability. Leading to what? Good question.
Another sentence popped into my head the other day, “Not knowing what comes next is, itself, an act of faith.” For most of my life, I did not tolerate uncertainty very well. When you have a strong streak of fear developing from a pretty early age, that gets magnified. Just like the anticipation of the reward that comes from alcoholic drinking enhances the whole addictive experience, uncertainty and fearfulness make for an awesome margarita, on the rocks, of course.
My first day of rehab stands out as a day that had quite a bit of uncertainty:
Drinking was how I tamped the fear and uncertainty down. Of course, I was smart enough to know what the consequences were, but I was willing to believe that those drinking-generated interludes of “no fear” were real. Eventually you understand that the temporary peace that will shortly be provided by those three glasses of wine is well, temporary. That’s the beginning of the phenomenon of the addictive substance losing its ability to do the thing that made us fall in love with it in the first place. And we all know where that leads.
I had been contemplating doing another “previously-enjoyed” version of the Extravaganza, (as I like to call it). I’m juggling a lot of balls and feeling like my creative inputs and outputs aren’t quite working the way they have in the past. I’m also not in a great mood, for a variety of reasons, and find the mornings to contain a bit more struggle than they have in recent months.
Which reminds me of my first Fall here in NY. I moved into the apartment I still occupy in October of 2020 and by December it was sort of furnished. I t was still pretty sparse, lots of books still in boxes. Not that much hung on the walls yet. I guess you don’t really know how it looks now, but not like that. I’m lucky to live where I do, it’s beautiful, it comforts me, it feels like home to me and it took a while to get here. My sobriety is pretty inextricably bound to this place, which I know isn’t the right way to think about it, but it’s also true.
Anyway, that first December, I wasn’t really planning to do much to mark the holidays. I was alone here in NY and had burned a lot of bridges. Also, it was the Pandemic—which was pretty strictly observed here in New York. I was a month removed from the confines of the sober house, not working and really not sure what was going to come next. I was very much alone. I have a gorgeous balcony, it even has the secret nook-like, Pirate Balcony. There were days when I would bleakly sit on the sofa, bleakly staring out at the gray skies watching reruns of The Office and wondering whether I could ever get to the spot where I could even consider something like that thing that is not supposed to be thinkable. I mean, the Big Book calls it the “jumping-off place” for a reason. Bill W was sleeping on a mattress in the basement of his Brooklyn home for that same reason.
Hopelessness is a terrible part of this disease and that’s where the balconies and such get involved. Hopelessness is what you feel when you fail over and over to get sober. It’s what you feel when everyone leaves, or will shortly. Hopeless is what you feel when you’re walking home alone from the same bar you walked home alone from the night before, looking forward to the coming delivery from Captain Cookie and the Milkman, just like last night, and realizing how hard the work of trying to convince one’s self that life wasn’t just worthless and empty really was. Hopeless is what I felt when I feared that nothing would ever change, could ever change.
I throw around the word “miracle” a lot and I’m sure most of it is an inappropriate use. However, in a tremendously unexpected and frankly kind of unbelievable way, people began showing up. It was suggested, strongly suggested by a recent entrant that I secure a tree. And I did. Truth be told, I didn’t really want to. I was going to be spending Christmas alone and wasn’t really looking forward to that. I didn’t know what was going to be happening for me in January, after everyone else returned to whatever re-filled with love and happiness and re-charged with enthusiasm for whatever was ahead.
I still looked at the balcony on gray days and wondered whether I should bother to put something out there. But now I had tree slowly unfurling. The acquisition of the tree had forced me to dig out the box of xmas stuff. A bare tree in the house is worse than no tree, ask Charley Brown. So now I had to decorate the tree. Okay, I did that. I always loved colored lights, but lived for many years in a white-lights are the only approved xmas lights special kind of darkness, so colored lights were secured and draped over the tree. I hung some ornaments.
Okay, it looked kind of nice. Especially at night. But the walls seemed really bare, too vacant. So, I started hanging up some of my things. Then, maybe a plant or two or seventeen would be nice. What about a new rug? Bookcases for the books. What if I hooked up the stereo? I don’t mean to make this sound like a home improvement show, it’s not about the things, it’s what I was doing: I was making a home. By myself. At 60. In a new place.
I was planting myself.
We could go in a number of directions here. We could talk about the Parable of the Sower, how the act of spreading seeds in a harsh environment is either a profligate waste of seeds or a radical example of unconditional love and faith. Or perhaps both. I mean, maybe it’s a bit over-dramatic to think of the sowing of a single seed as profligate or as demonstrating unwavering faith. In any event, the thing that matters is what grows.
I was, and am, fascinated by the idea that something like a tree can spring from an acorn, that little seeds can turn into big plants in a few weeks. Have you considered the rate of growth? It’s astonishing. If you hadn’t seen this work before, you would definitely be very, very skeptical. And correctly so. But you’d ultimately be wrong—but in the good way. In the, wow-I-learned-something way.
I had a variety of reasons for not wanting an xmas tree, they all gave way in the face of this brand new insistence that I do something to make things seem a little cheerier. I’m not going to say something dumb and corny like hope and faith grew from that xmas tree. Technically, the xmas tree was already pretty dead and was soon to be really dead (they may not have the freshest trees on York Ave.). But hope and faith did grow from that xmas tree.
I didn’t know what was coming next, but there were signs that things would be okay, very different, given the messengers and what-not, but okay.
That was the beginning of real faith and hope for me. I’m not going to tell you that walking across the street to secure a 4 foot tree was some magnificent act of courage. But it was. Walking across the street to buy a 4 foot xmas tree from the place, in front of the bodega that weirdly doesn’t carry Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts, was an act of real courage. Courage in the sense that it came from my heart, from a belief that things were going to be okay and were already in the process of working out. Even though that seemed far from obvious.
I think the hidden bear-trap genius of the Steps is the way it captures the worst traits of alcoholics and then sneakily turns it against our own alcoholic egos. Kind of like those great scenes where the hero shoots the villain with his own gun. As an alcoholic, I believed some outlandish nonsense, patently untrue lies about myself and the world around me. Bill W sneakily uses “willingness” to bait the trap, it’s all that is necessary to make a beginning..
Well, there is one other thing that’s necessary for there to be a beginning, and that’s an end. At least given our current constructs of time and matter. And just like when you look at the days like independent dots on the calendar, you invite judging them on that basis, this view of the world also promotes evaluating beginnings and endings as separate entities. A big reason I’m sober on this Sunday morning is because I realized that view of the world wasn’t true. Endings and beginnings are just bookmarks, the unread, maybe even unwritten pages to come are hope. One finds the courage to turn the next page, or write it, with the help of the faith muscle.
This is the kind of day that it is easy to be unenthusiastic about. Or it’s the kind of day where all of the possibilities in the world are stored in those grim, gray clouds. Rain doesn’t sound like such a horrible thing in that case, does it?
All of those plants still growing out on the balcony think it’s a pretty great thing. Me too.
The TFLMS Pyramid of Support
Perhaps you enjoy reading what we write or the podcast or whatever, and maybe you were even thinking, “Gee, I wonder if there is something I could do to help. The good news is that there is. Like the famed game show of legend, “The $20,000 Dollar Pyramid,” there is something similar at work here. If you really like us and read us every day, maybe it would be cool to upgrade your subscription, or you can get your friends to pay, or you can just share what share with you. It’s all cool and it’s all very much appreciated, and without further ado:
It’s the TFLMS Pyramid of Support:
For us, reading and writing have been a big part of recovery and sobriety. We thought we’d start sharing some of our favorite books on the topic of recovery, addiction and general happiness and telling you how they helped us! If you have ideas, thoughts, comments, suggestions or if there are some books that you’d like to chat about, well, we’d love to do that with you. 2
Now, here’s something new. You may have heard me mention something about writing your story in the style of Bill W’s: and this is where we are going to do it. If you want to write your story and share it, I’ll be happy to put it here for other folks to read. If you’d like to record yourself reading your own story (I highly, highly recommend this), I’ll put it here, too:
The “Anyone Anywhere” Meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous
It’s the “Anyone Anywhere” meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, this Tuesday evening at 7pm. We’re ready to go and hope you can join us this Tuesday! It’s 1/2 AA Meeting, 1/2 Alcoholic Book Club and 1/2 something else we haven’t figured out yet. We’ve been reading the “Stories from the Back of the Book,” and they are all so great. It’s a fun way to learn more about the Big Book and reading these stories out loud is a little like listening to the legends of AA share.
Hope you can join us!
From the TFLMS Archives:
How can “sheer” and “shear” exist in the same language?
Seriously, write a book review (or we might expand into movies!) and we’ll probably put it up.