I’m grateful for a gorgeous Friday morning. I’m grateful for faith and trust. I’m grateful for the people who help me see the next step. I’m grateful for setting the right objectives. I’m grateful to be sober today.
song of the week:
Yeah, it is Friday. Big week for TBD. Someone close to me has been saying, for a while now, that things were about to change for me. I think they are. Like nearly everything else that has happened over the last four years ( a randomly-selected time period that coincides with my sobriety), well, people show up, completely unexpected things happen, things change and the world spins like it always does.
My old alcoholic mindset approached life by asking “why is this happening to me?” These days, it’s hard not to approach just about everything with a sense of wonder and harmony. I know, break out the unicorns and rainbows and whatnot. I had another plan for the song of the week, a well-formed plan.1 I’m in kind of a good mood, so was bopping around the apartment and thinking about the former (and maybe soon-to-be) song of the week and was sitting down to finish this and send it out and thought to myself, “Self, what would you like to be listening to, before you begin obsessively listening to the (former) song of the week?”
I replied, “It’s Friday, I think there is only one song.”
And then, speaking of wonder, I was browsing through YouTube and found this. Full Stop. Maybe my most favorite song of all time, a song that has guided me through thick and thin. A song I first heard as an intern/custodian at the Iowa City Press-Citizen loading dock, on a Friday. A song heard so intermittently on the radio (how one heard songs back then) that it drove the obsession to great heights.2 A song about one special day of the week.3 And now someone has put this song to a video about my home and most loved city, and also the subway.4
And it’s Friday.
There could be only one song for this day, for this week. I’ve been in lesson-learning mode for a while now, I will tell you that it can be an exhausting enterprise. It’s the kind of thing that if I were still drinking, well, things would be really out of hand. I can see how much differently I would approach all of the situations that have been thrown my way over the last few years. I can see pretty clearly now that the most important of the many shifts in thinking that have occurred, is this one:
No matter how shitty things get, there is something valuable to be learned.
Not always something pleasant or something that has been yearned-for over many decades, I think it’s somehow getting equipped for what’s coming. It’s being forced, along with a bit of heart-breakage to let go of cherished things and people, to make space for what’s next. I have been learning a different kind of cause and effect. The old version was very linear, I did something and then there was supposed to be a reward. In that old construct, I had the power to shape the future, unless other people and events interfered. I was the famous alcoholic director and object of Big Book scorn.
Except that belief only persisted as long it was specially hydrated. I soon saw how little power I had, how little control. This scared the be-jeebers out of me and I tried to fix this by drinking more and grabbing more tightly. When that proved unsustainable, I sort of became willing to believe this Higher Power thing.
As I started focusing on writing a 140-character gratitude list every morning, I slowly began to see the world in a different way. I began to be able to re-frame events so that they were no longer things that “happened to me,” they were now things I needed to learn. I bolded that on purpose. These weren’t nice learnings that I tacked on at the end, “well, at least I learned about Danish pastry!” No, I saw that the fundamental purpose of the events in my life was making the next instant possible. And not just for me.
I also began to see that there was an easy way and a hard way. I have typically been more of a “hard way” person over the years. Loving movies like this one has not helped:
The metaphorical “easy way,” the one that involves connection to a Higher Power, is not without its own challenges, it might even involve some pretty hard moments. The thing about the “easy way,” and this is not to be confused with the “easier, softer path stuff,” is that it opens up the possibility that the shitty stuff somehow enables the really good stuff. Like “organically” fertilized farms.5
That’s an awful example. But it’s seeing how saying good-bye to things that were loved very much makes possible whatever is coming next. The wonder in my life doesn’t come from glamorous escapades or helicopter rides, it comes from not knowing what comes next, but still living in faith that whatever it is, things will be okay. They’ll be the way they’re supposed to be. It lets me see that life is a series of curving, dynamic, unpredictable shapes that move in unpredictable ways, that create multiple intersections; not a straight-shot Interstate with no speed limit (like in Montana) where everything that was, can only be seen in the rear view mirror.
The “easy way” allowed me to see that nothing really ended. Atoms collide and bounce away, changed by the impact in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Those moments may be gone, but they live on in what happens next. They are forever integral to what comes after. Instead of that process, the process of life, being one that generated feelings of loss and regret, I saw that it was always part of making something new.
Something I couldn’t build myself, something I couldn’t really imagine myself. But something that somehow ended up being myself.
Happy Friday.
Yes, I literally say this every week.
Ah yes, intermittent rewards. The way to get mice addicted to stuff, also what drives co-dependent relationships.
“Never on a Sunday. Never on a Monday.”
If you’d like a funny reaction from a New Yorker, when they ask you what you like best about living in the City, answer this way: “The Subway!”
Not trying to discourage you. Organic does not always equal “clean.” Also, is that organic spinach really vegan?