The Definition of Peace

I’m grateful for a really good night of sleep. I’m grateful for a gorgeous sunny morning. I’m grateful for everything I’ve been given. I’m grateful for examples of the Program working. I’m grateful for the Big Book, my coffee and the peace in my heart. I’m grateful to be sober today.

I frequently find myself being grateful for something I refer to as “peace in my heart,” or “peace and calm,” or just plain, “peace.” I did it again this morning and it had me thinking about what it is that I really mean by that. How can I describe the feeling of peace in my heart? I remember growing up, we were supposed to pass “God’s peace,” to the other congregants, I guess the idea was to spread the Word using a popular model of disease transmission. I guess I never really knew what I was passing along, or even what I was supposed to?

Well, to start, the concept of peace is probably best understood in the context of war. Peace can simply be the absence of war. I personally became an avid reader of military history when I was in the Fifth grade; one of the motivations for securing a coveted Des Moines Register carrier-ship was to fund my membership in the Military History Book Club. This is all true. If you were to ask a certain 6th Grader about war, he would have told you some Clausewitzian thing about it being a fairly extreme measure of securing national aims. That doesn’t help this discussion at all.

I refer to the 5th and 6th grade years here, because I truly am coming to believe this was when I started thinking some of the core alcoholic thinking patterns—that I was different than everyone else, that I didn’t really understand other people, that I was always slightly out of sync, that I didn’t really understand the world around me, that my place in the world was undefined, at best, and maybe completely accidental.

In my effort to answer some of these questions, I came to believe that the defect that was common to all of those questions was me. That there was something off about me, that there was something out-of-sync, about me. I came to also believe that it was those same defects that inflicted so much pain on others. I came to believe that my feelings could be responsible for the feelings of others.

I didn’t begin a life of manipulation and deceit to gain anything other than acceptance. I wasn’t trying to trick anyone out of love or money, or really anything tangible, I just wanted to make them happy. I had come to believe this meant adopting a certain persona, trying to become the thing that each and every person needed and loved, even thought it meant adopting conflicting personas and ignoring my own actual one.

I don’t mean to suggest that I was suffering from a split personality type thing, except maybe I was. The Big Book describes the active alcoholic as having a Jekyll and Hyde personality—one of the things that the civilians find so difficult to understand about us. The truth is, this alcoholic was neither actually Jekyll, nor Hyde. Those were both alcoholic creations—I was never actually that good or that bad.

Mickey Mantle, a fairly impressive alcoholic who was also one of the greatest pure power hitters in baseball history, used to joke about how he would play drunk somtimes and just try to “hit the ball in the middle.” Not the middle of the ball—his blurry vision was producing three major league quality curveballs coming at him. The one in the middle was probably the right ball to hit.

I would not describe my early sobriety as peaceful. I was wracked with anxiety, doubt and fear. I felt like I had come unmoored from everything I knew and didn’t know where I would land, or how. I didn’t know what life would look like, or could. I woke up in the early, early mornings with the shot-in-the-gut “realization,” that I had driven everyone away, that I was irretrievably alone, that I didn’t really matter to other people anymore. And maybe it was better that way. Life seemed empty, there were certainly no promises dancing in the air.

What happened? A sponsor told me to examine my motives before interacting with others. I started seeing that even innocent, funny things were still bids for attention, efforts to provoke a desired response from someone else. Is this a horrible thing? No, it’s not. But I started to see how often that form of gentle manipulation was my aim, like roughly all of the time. This forced me to start to actually consider how the other person was going to feel by me saying or not saying something.

Of course, this took me to the old alcoholic activity filter:

Does this need to be said? Does this need to be said by me? Does this need to be said by me now?

If one is honest with oneself, there isn’t too much that makes it through all of those filters. I actually started talking less, but meaning what I said more. What I said started representing more about what I wanted to share about me, as opposed to provoking a certain reaction in you, so that you would think of me a certain way. Maybe that’s a subtle difference, but it has transformed my relationships with other people.

It’s brought relationships into the light, instead of always trying to determine what is the right thing to say to get the response I want, I just express somethign about myself and am open for the other person doing the same. I stopped thinking that I needed to convince other people to like me, I only needed to be my authentic self, some people wouldn’t like that or me, but those weren’t the right people for me. Being my authentic self made room for the right people to show up.

I talk about variations on this theme a lot, but peace started to flow in when control started to ebb away. I realized that I never really had control, that my efforts to secure it had been kind of laughable and also doomed. There’s a phrase I like to use in negotiations—when you give someone something they need but that doesn’t really matter to you, it’s like giving the sleeves from a vest. See, a vest doesn’t have or need sleeves! Hence giving them to the other side is costless. Well, I finally realized I was spending my life chasing sleeve from a vest. My life was chasing something that didn’t exist and would have no use, even if I acquired it.

That sounds like, and was, a pretty bleak way to live life. Peace didn’t flood my life like the sunlight on a pretty Spring morning. Peace, for this alcoholic, was more the gradual ebbing away of the darkness, the fear. The force that was driving this was simple self-acceptance. Coming to believe that being myself was enough, and that if I accomplished that, being myself, the right things would happen. Whatever those right things are.

Simple self-acceptance let me start seeing that things were probably going to be ok, that maybe it wasn’t quite as dark out there as I thought. As the fear started to disappear, along with the darkness, what began to emerge was just me. Highly imperfect, still subject to insane feats of miscalculation and self-deception, but with an understanding of how the whole machine works. The things I think, the things I used to think defined the world, well, now I just know that they can be nothing more than crazy, random signals generated by the uncontrollable and ever-spinning hamster wheel.

Maybe it’s over-dramatic to describe my pre-sober life as a war. But my life then was about achieving external aims that I set: The result was misery and required drinking. The peace in my heart, even on days when fear and doubt still press in, comes from knowing, really knowing, that whatever is next is what was meant for me. When I listen to my heart, there aren’t war cries or trumpets stirring me to action, it’s just the unshakeable feeling that things will be okay, that I will be okay and that what is supposed to happen, generally does. That’s not just a temporary cease-fire, that’s peace.