SUNDAY GRATITUDE EXTRAVAGANZA: MORE RAINY DAYS
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I’m grateful for a trip to the farmer’s market and for the purchase of unnecessary books. I’m grateful for the thump the Sunday newspaper makes outside my door. I’m grateful for a rainy day and a chance to get things done. I’m grateful for here. I’m grateful to be sober today.
October is drawing to a close, it’s been a very rainy, semi-dreary month. On the bright side, there has been a fair amount of swanky umbrella deployment and my garden doesn’t need to be watered. Yesterday, was a gorgeous day, sunny, bright, hot even, like a last gasp of the summer that actually left a little while ago.
October is also my anniversary month, although I don’t get terribly excited about my anniversary. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure finally getting sober after a decade of trying counts as at least a minor miracle, but I just never really feel like “celebrating” it. I think part of the reason for the way I feel about it, is that the day before my sober date, well, that’s not usually such a great day for most of us. For many of us, that sobriety date also marks the bottom.
When I peruse social media and look at the messaging around recovery, one might be led to believe that getting sober leads to a life spent walking joyously and care-free on a beach, drawing personal sustenance from the washing away of the footprints. Or sobriety is a walk in the woods on a crisp fall day—again sunny. Or sobriety is just appreciating the beauty of the sunrise and sunset.1 Again the sunny thing.
This is not headed in the direction of how sobriety helps me get through the rainy days. I’m not so big on emphasizing the struggle behind sobriety these days. First, as you know, I’m very big on the power of gratitude, and think a key to my sobriety has been re-framing things to emphasize the positives, replacing the nearly-automatic negative thinking patterns that drove my drinking. I started realizing the more I emphasized the struggle, the more it felt like I was struggling.
An under-appreciated aspect of gratitude is its effect on expectations. I would maybe liken it to what happens when you spray one of those big, awful water bugs with bug spray. One of those classic AA sayings is “Expectations are resentments in waiting,” or something like that. The idea being, unexpressed expectations often lead to even more tightly repressed resentments, which, in turn, may justify a fair amount of drinking. At least in the experience of this alcoholic.
Gratitude seems to squash those expectations. I think simply by redirecting my attention from what maybe didn’t happen, to what did. As always, gratitude’s steady accomplice is the here and now. Groucho Marx or Woody Allen or someone random in AA said something like most of life is just about showing up. That’s basically the message that gratitude helps deliver.
Second, emphasizing the struggle needs to be balanced with our prime directive in AA—not expressing our own views on sobriety or “sharing like our lives depend on it,” it’s this:
Each group has but one primary purpose—to carry its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.
I really do shudder when I hear people in meetings go on at length at how hard this has all been, and how hard every day is. I mean that’s all true, but that’s not the message I think we should be carrying to the alcoholic (or addict) who still suffers. It’s this:
This is possible. You can do this. Your life will be better.
That message needs to be tempered and offered along with practical advice on how to accomplish this change-of-life. I think the work is hard, coming to terms with one’s self is not an easy thing, regardless of the circumstances. Sobriety doesn’t turn rainy days into sunny ones. I think the Big Book Promises are dangerous territory—-they suggest that sobriety is the great solver of all problems. Financial insecurity—gone? Personal awkwardness—gone? The promises don’t have anything to do with changing external circumstances, the promises aren’t about the world changing, they are simply about what happens when I change how I view my place in the world. The promises come, I think, when one adopts a humble attitude and stops expecting anything to change but themselves.
I think the imagery around recovery can create false expectations about what life is actually like in sobriety. For sure, getting sober certainly feels like walking out into the sunlight for the first time in a long time. I think there are often pink clouds drifting by on days like that. Maybe it’s because I was a Labrador Retriever in a prior life, but I tend to be all weather, and that goes for my sobriety, too. No one posts pictures on Instagram of walks in the park on rainy day when they want to emphasize the fantastic-ness of sobriety.
I don’t need spectacular settings to show me the value of sobriety. When I wake up with peace in my heart on a rainy day like today, well, that’s how I know it’s working. I would be very disappointed if sobriety made every day sunny and beautiful and IG-ready. My sobriety has helped me re-discover myself, re-orient my life and has has infused this 60-year old life with excitement, creativity, beautiful unexpectedness, sadness, heartbreak, joy, happiness, fear and ridiculous optimism.
Meaning, it’s the most beautiful, improbable thing that could ever have happened. I don’t need a sunny day to appreciate that.
If you don’t choose to celebrate your sobriety with an out-of-doors jaunt on a rainy day, we have you covered. As the man says, pour yourself a cup of coffee and let us do the talking:
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 I Help Support TFLMS??
I say this as someone who takes a lot of pictures of the sunrise from the Pirate Balcony.
Seriously, write a book review (or we might expand into movies!) and we’ll probably put it up.