The Paradox of Powerlessness

How "Pausing" is the one, true superpower

I’m grateful for a chance to help out. I’m grateful for another gorgeous morning. I’m grateful for reading the Big Book with friends. I’m grateful a chance to see things differently every day. I’m grateful for being able to see what is. I’m grateful to be sober today.

I’m going to begin today’s disquisition with a question:

What the f*** happened to July?

As you may know, there is a wealth of education to be had by watching YouTube videos. Whether one is being educated on actual facts or science is determined on a case-by-case basis. Anyway, one of the things folks are realizing is that very little in the universe is solid-state and lots of things, including gravity, come in waves. Also, you can prove mathematically that time passes more slowly where there is more gravity. So, if gravity fluctuates, time fluctuates. Or vice versa, potentially.¹

Between YouTube and staying awake through all of Oppenheimer, I feel like I have a pretty decent grasp of quantum mechanics. It turns out that the logical operation of the great forces of the Universe create all of these weird paradoxes that shouldn’t be possible. Are we going down the time travel/multiverse nonsense strand again? On a Wednesday? No. We’re not.

We’re exploring the paradox of powerlessness and the weird way that acknowledging powerlessness in one aspect of life somehow creates, well, some kind of corresponding power in other parts of life. Where does this start in the context of addiction? Well, Step One says:

We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Now, if you were to turn to YouTube or Twitter for advice on this subject, you’re going to run into a lot of people who have pretty deeply held feelings that the words of the First Step and other words, like “alcoholic,” are really designed to create mini-prisons of shame and stigma, policed by AA zealots who administer random “is your mind right?” challenges based on AA sayings.

I can remember heading off to a medical intake session for my first Intensive Outpatient Program and having the thought, “If I’m powerless over alcohol, how am I going to do this?” Here’s where reading the Big Book is really important: You learn that you’re not a pathetic rag doll incapable of independent action and requiring constant supervision. It’s that you have a disease whose central symptom is that you can’t control your drinking. The admission of the First Step is just and only that.

I’ve learned through repetitive experiments, once I start drinking, once I even take that first drink, the gantry arm falls away and the rocket is on it’s way to escape velocity. That’s what the First Step means to me. I think the problem comes when the idea of “powerlessness” gets invisibly conflated with the turning over of one’s will and life to the care of a higher power.

They teach you things in Law School about how to read statutes and opinions and such, because it’s often quite challenging to figure out what the f*** all those words mean. So, there are some rules that help. One of those is that all the words have to mean something and that if someone wanted to say the exact same thing, they’d use the same exact words.

The word “powerless” is used only in the First Step. The First Step could be seen as a sharp rap to the back of the head, accompanied by empathetic and caring wake-up call, like:

Hey Dumbshit! You have a disease that makes you do a lot of stupid shit. If you agree, nod “yes,” and move on to Step Two.

It is not a command to surrender and put your hands up on the wall. I’m not going off again on this tangent. It takes a boatload of courage and fortitude and well, power, to admit your life is way off the rails. It takes an even larger amount of all of those things to walk down those steps to a meeting, or to just go and ask someone for help.

I think one of the most powerful moments in recovery/sobriety is the realization that the notion of “control” is an illusion, and not only in the context of the addiction. In my case, I can see over and over and over, how it was the delusion that I could control things, other people, outcomes that drove my frustrations, my resentments, and ultimately, my drinking. That’s what the Big Book says is the enemy and that’s the thing I have to leave to my Higher Power.

I’m not sure who said this, it might have been Miles Davis or John Coltrane (God, to see the the Miles Davis Quintet live), but it was to the effect that the real music is the space between the notes. If you think about ballet, the leap is certainly amazing, but the ability to let gravity take over and land on a sliver of one foot and then pause, stopping all of that momentum, that's breathtaking. When you listen to Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, it takes off right away with this crazy, urgent pace, what’s astonishing is not the way everything starts hurtling together, it’s the crisp pauses between the notes, it’s the silences that create the intensity.

I’m developing an ability in sobriety to pause between all of the hurtling, to see what matters is the quiet part between the notes. I was born with a brain that makes big dramatic leaps and draws all sorts of wild, grandiose, improbable conclusions. I did not order this brain from the back pages of “Boy’s Life” or “Mad Magazine.” It’s the original equipment and it has some pretty interesting uses, when pointed in the right direction. And that’s it: I needed someone else/something else to take over the whole “which we are pointing this thing?” conversation.

I didn’t lose power when I finally let AA save my life. I’m developing real power in sobriety. I’m developing the power to not do stuff, to not jump to conclusions, to not let the theories unravel “JFK”-style.² I’m developing the power to pause. I’m developing the power to let myself be happy.

One of my mainstay questions on the Podcast is, “If you had a superpower, what would it be?” I always think that answer is pretty illuminating, also I get very judge-y about what is and is not a “superpower.”³ My personal choices would be invisibility and fire-starting. No, I would not have given 15 year-old me access to those kinds of things. No one, myself included, has ever answered the “Breakfast with an Alcoholic” classic question with:

The ability to pause.

It’s the pause that happens for me when I do some disciplined, let-it-go breathing, or when I sit out on the Pirate Balcony and watch the clouds wisp by. It’s when I consider what I could do and then wait until I see what I should do. When I listen, rather than react. When I’m quiet. When I let things come to me, instead of relentlessly chasing them down. When I let, “We have to do something!” turn into, “things will be okay, if I do my best.”

None of that comes easily. That’s another paradox: Calm and ease and peace require some hard work and dedication. Yes, I’m powerless over alcohol. Until I recognized I was simply suffering from the disease of alcoholism (yes, an “alcoholic”) and lacked the ability to control my drinking, I couldn’t start building the power that mattered:

The power to see there was a power greater than me.

At least that’s the view from the Pirate Balcony.

1. I guess there are folks who say that time creates gravity. If that’s true, then the changes we observe in gravity would suggest that time changes. So, potato, potat-oh!

2. The Oliver Stone movie, not the actual assassination.

3. Wishing for peace and for everyone to be fed is lovely, but not a “superpower.”