I’m grateful for windy spring days. I’m grateful for new chances. I’m grateful for trying things differently. I’m grateful for the way the garden is growing and for all of the new additions. I’m grateful for less turmoil. I’m grateful to be sober today.
It’s Wednesday. For whatever reason, not a favorite day. I’m not sure why, maybe the fact that it contains the word “Deadens” is a clue. I like Mondays better than Wednesdays. Go figure—maybe some horribly unpleasant thing happened to me on a long ago Wednesday, or maybe it’s when the weekend is the farthest away it can be—haha —kind of like hitting bottom as we were discussing yesterday.1
Sometimes it’s helpful to mix in some additional concepts with the usual crew of Big Book suspects. One concept that I think is elliptically expressed in the Big Book is the idea of being present and mindful. While the spiritual provenance of those concepts pre-date the Big Book, they simply were not in vogue in the 1930’s. I think if you take a look at the “Promises,” you can make the case that most of them flow from the practice of mindfulness, which is also incorporated into the program with its focus on “One Day at a Time,” and the enshrinement of meditation in Step Eleven.
For me, it was never enough to stop drinking. I tried that approach roughly one gazillion times with lengths of abstinence ranging from 25 minutes to four months. Even attending a meeting every day and having the encouragement of friends and family wasn’t enough because none of that was aimed at actually fixing the problem. The problem that generated the initial need to drink as well as the extensive daily maintenance schedule that had evolved. That problem was how I looked at my place in the world, how I looked at me.
I don’t really like the connotations around “hitting rock bottom,” but we can agree to keep using phrases like that to denote the point at which things begin to trend in a positive direction. Is that ok? As I said yesterday, I think it’ s a mistake to present sobriety as something that can only happen when you’ve run out of all the options. There are plenty of data points out there to support the necessity of the bottom, my story included, but I wonder if that’s not partly a function of how the program is presented.
What if the life changing stuff was presented as life changing stuff, not just as sort of unpleasant chores that are necessary to make it through another day without drinking? After the Big Book was published, Bill’s attention focused on expanding the scope of AA’s reach and he spent a fair amount of time wondering how to repackage the principles of AA into something that non-problem drinkers might use to address issues around “emotional sobriety.” Yes, Bill W. was using that phrase in the 1940’s and he clearly saw that the Program of Alcoholics Anonymous was not just something to be deployed when the main and reserve chutes had already failed. Bill W. characterized his sober life as involving the discovery of how groovy life was in “the fourth dimension.” 2 Bill W. saw that it was about changing lives, not stopping drinking.
Yes, most of us come into the Program in moments of crisis. I don’t think that means we should be defining the program as only a form of long-term crisis management. One of my favorite sayings, and one I’ve had occasion to use maybe a few too many times:
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
Meaning, the seeds of change are present in every crisis. A crisis presents an opportunity (really a very pressing need with a lot of urgency attached) for changing perspective and evaluating new alternatives. A crisis does force you to look at how you got to this point and it forces you to come up with a plan. No, a new plan. The old “plan” was simply the old alcoholic hog getting dressed up in fancy outfits.3 A crisis requires new thinking, bold thinking. Simply avoiding the noose is a form of crisis management, but one that will usually lead to an increasing number of opportunities to trot out that alcoholic magical escape routine over and over. As a wise man once said:
Sometimes there are just too many chainsaws.
I’ve been reading non-conference approved literature and thinking about how to incorporate some of the principles of life design into the process of working the steps. One book I’ve been reading is “Designing Your Life,” two Stanford design professors ingeniously applying the principles of successful product design to engineer a process to “build a well-lived, joyful life.” 4 Hmmm could I sign up for that one?
They lay out a process that is designed to help produce the insights necessary to prototype and build an actual joyful life. The first chapter, called “Start Where You Are,” lays out the fundamental premise: Design is about solving problems. What they call a “wicked problem,” is the kind of thing that can produce stunning design:
Let’s face it, you’re not reading this book because you have all the answers, are in your dream job, and have a life imbued with more meaning and purpose than you can imagine. Somewhere, in some area of your life, you are stuck.
You have a wicked problem.
Designing Your Life, p. 3
The other really interesting concept is the idea of “gravity problems,” meaning problems relating to the application of reality to one’s life. For example, if one’s stated intention for their life is to write fabulously popular and profitable Haikus and live on a recently purchased private island to which they fly on a Falcon 2000. Well, unless those are really, really good haikus, there may be a gravity problem. Does that kind of thinking sound familiar, my alcoholic compadres? Yeah, I thought so, too. Want to hear their answer?
The only response to a gravity problem is acceptance. And this is where all good designers begin. This is the “You Are Here” or “Accept” phase of design thinking. Acceptance. That’s why you start where you are. Not where you wish you were. Not where you hope you are. Not where you think you should be. But right where you are.
Designing Your Life, p. 14
And acceptance is the answer to all of my problems today…I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place or thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment…Until I could accept my alcoholism, I could not stay sober; unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy.
Big Book, p. 417
See, maybe it’s a pretty similar exercise. What if someone had come to me in 2017 with this book and the Big Book in hand and proposed that we not simply try to stop drinking, but instead, embark on an adventure to identify what really matters to me, to find principles I can live that will give my life meaning and purpose, a journey to recovery happiness and joy and curiosity, a journey to recover myself? To be fair, I probably would have said, “no” then, too. But I would have definitely said “yes” to the hero’s journey, life-changing quest thing before just agreeing to replace my daily trip to the bar with a daily trip to a church basement somewhere. Meaning, maybe there was some chance I might have started this whole thing earlier—without the need to hit rock bottom. Also, I like to think the retention rates around the adventure-filled, life changing expedition would exceed the “whew, I staved off disaster again, today” approach.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t really want to live the life I had, just without the drinking. That idea assumes, very incorrectly, that drinking was just a cheap accessory I picked up along the line. An accessory that I was now kind of illogically attached to, but could be persuaded to discard it once I saw how it compromised the whole look. No, for this alcoholic, it was much more of a “Fatal Attraction” type of situation, and while there was no actual boiling of bunnies, it had that kind of grim, this is only going to end by holding you underwater in the tub for a long, long time feel to it. Again, if given the choice, I might have opted for the “let’s design a cool, happy life” thing instead of the death struggle in the bathtub.
I come back to this, the Big Book says the idea is to be “happy, joyous and free,” not just alcohol-free. That freedom comes from using the process outlined in the Big Book to produce the insights necessary to fashion a new life, one that will be situated in the not-so-explored, but super-groovy-sounding fourth dimension. My drinking for sure generated a pretty existential crisis. I like to think I’m not wasting it. Or my life either.
Should it be “furthest?”
No, he didn’t use the word “groovy,” but think he would now.
“Hog” is more Iowa than “pig.”
Designing Your Life, Bill Burnett & Dave Evans (Knopf, 2016)