Tiny Strawberries

I’m grateful for momentum. I’m grateful for the long game. I’m grateful for what I know about myself. I’m grateful for feeling but not having to react. I’m grateful for quiet, easy nights and excellent coffee in the morning. I’m grateful for peace where there was chaos. I’m grateful to be sober today.

song of the week:

Oh my goodness, such an eventful week and where to start? Well, here, where I burden you with the silliness of the song of the week selection process. Lots happened this week and there were lots of potential candidates because there were a lot of moods and emotions zipping around. There was a moment very recently where we were about to go off track and do something really crazy.

It’s been a super-busy week and a certain someone was in his den—one of his very favorite places in the world (maybe tied with the pirate balcony). There was still a bunch of work to be done and it was already kind of late. The den is lined with books and the desk where this is written and, most importantly, his beloved stereo which, of course includes a turntable.

My son and son-in-law are fascinated with the operation of said turntable and find it hard to believe that a spinning disk of vinyl and a needle can produce such a realistic sound. I’m not going to get into all of the vagaries of the analog vs digital music realms, but will say that listening to certain albums on a turntable is completely transformative. If you listen, you can hear all of the instruments. If you really, really listen, you can almost capture a little bit of the feeling that went along with the playing. Ok, I always go too far.

Confusing things happen sometimes and I’ve been sorting some things out this week. I think the Universe is really good at serving up the next challenge that has to be faced, or driving home a point that really needs to be made, or just letting me know there is an opportunity to grow and see things differently.

To be honest, I kind of hate this sometimes and wish that the Universe would stop with making all of these points. But that’s where acceptance comes in and of course, accepting the hand we’ve been dealt, understanding that everywhere we end up in life, good or bad, happy or heartbreaking, there’s always an important lesson; a chance to see where things went wrong and understand the changes that need to be made.

I’ve been presented with a lot of those opportunities. I live a pretty peaceful and happy life. I get to do what I love to do, I get to ramble around being myself on a pretty relentless basis and it makes me feel light and happy and excited. The universe has hit a lot of hard grounders with really nasty bounces at me over the last several years and maybe I didn’t field all of those cleanly, but as I sat in the den and reflected on where I was, I was pretty happy and content.

I love jazz and don’t talk about it much here. I started listening to a college radio station growing up that played mostly jazz and I began to learn the history and grew to understand and love the music. I played the saxophone. I also love classical music and cheesy ‘80s music, but there is nothing like jazz to really touch me deeply. Sometimes I’m hesitant to play certain albums because of how deeply I feel. Most of the jazz I really like is really sad, I think one of the reasons I grew to love jazz was that it touched this sad part of me, this part way deep down in there.

I’m not sure how that sad part developed, too many romantic movies maybe. But there are songs that are just completely unbearable sometimes because of how much they make me feel. So, I’m in the den and decide to play an album I haven’t played in a long time and suddenly it’s Bill Evans playing that melancholy, gorgeous piano on this song:

This has been a secret theme song for a long time. Trust me, when you listen to the vinyl version of this, the brush on the drums comes to life and the spare chords hit really, really deep. I was a first-year law student when I acquired this album at a used record store. I would play it at night before I’d head to the library for another late night of study. It was a sad, solitary time for me. I had moved to Philadelphia, where I knew no one and was working my proverbial tail off in a pretty competitive law school setting. My girlfriend had started to date one of my best friends in a head-scratching turn of events.

I was alone and pretty sad and lucky to have the huge abyss of work that I could throw myself into and forget for a bit. Oh, and I drank a lot. But I’d play this song and let myself feel the hurt and the pain, the sadness and the fear. It wasn’t a great feeling and by the end, I often felt kind of wrung-out, maybe a little defeated, but also somehow lighter.

I got sober by changing the way I thought about the world and myself. It started with some very hard stuff, lots of terrible things that I had to cope with. It was hard. The Universe sent help, but sometimes took it away, too. Things started to change when I accepted responsibility for where I was, when I accepted that I had a role in all of the tragedies. They weren’t all things that happened to me, I often put myself in places and situations where bad things tend to happen. I knew the people I was “trusting” and I knew, deep down, that it was a huge mistake. Recognizing my role was a critical part of the process, because until you hold yourself accountable, there’s nothing that will really change. There’s nothing that can change.

Terrible stuff happens in the world. People do terrible things to each other; things that alter lives and cause lasting damage. But as long as I saw those things as happening to me, well, there’s not much I could do to change those things, to change my life, except cower in fear, waiting for the same disaster to happen again. Sauvignon blanc is an excellent companion for this exercise.

There’s only one person I have a chance of changing—that’s me.

When I realized I could only change myself, that what other people did was what other people did, I actually began to feel better. Changing other people is hard work and the biggest problem is that the people don’t tend to stay changed. It’s frustrating and actually, I’m not sure it ever really works. I realized that if I wanted my life to be different, if I wanted different outcomes than the relentless series of failures and heartbreaks I had been living, well, I needed to live my life differently.

I’m the only one who can do that.

No one actually likes introspection and self-examination. It’s very hard and my relentless self-dishonesty made it difficult to see what I needed to change and what I could change. I was the victim, couldn’t everyone see that? As time passed, and I began to level with myself, actually be honest with myself, I saw that the bad stuff that happened to me had a common denominator:

Me.

I had to face the fact that I was the architect of the chaos in my life. Sure, other people did mean, shitty stuff, but I was the one who put those people in my life. I was the one who gave those other people power. I was the one who kept thinking that if I just kept at it, these other people would change and then things would finally be the way they were supposed to be. I was the one who kept finding these people.

I gave up the “supposed to be” part and that helped, too. All of my expectations about how I was supposed to live, the things that I thought were necessary, turned out to be dangerously false beacons. When I stepped away and asked myself why I thought I was entitled to live the way I had been living, I really didn’t have an answer. I thought things would eventually just “turn out.” I hadn’t taken responsibility for my own choices, my own actions, my own crazy ways of thinking and my capacity to tolerate dishonesty—both in myself and others.

When I talk about the bottom with sponsees or at meetings, I usually say something like, the bottom is the moment when you realize that you are about as far away from yourself as you can be, the realization that you are as far away as possible from the person you were meant to be. The feeling of being lost and adrift is appropriate because it that’s moment when you realize just how lost you are. Maybe other people led me astray or read the map wrong, but I was the one who walked off the trail and most importantly, I’m the only one who can find the way back. My life changed when I finally saw my role in the chaos. And when I finally accepted that there was only one person I could change. And what was the change?

I stopped trying to be things for other people. I stopped trying to act out roles that would generate love and affection. I was honest with myself and took an honest inventory of my strengths and weaknesses. I saw who I really was and let myself feel what I really wanted. I saw that the only way to happiness and content was by being myself. I saw that if I was myself, presented myself to the world honestly and was honest about how I felt and what mattered to me, then the Universe could finally present me with what was meant for me.

Several years ago, I had a very memorable, very lovely lunch at a very swanky restaurant and the dessert featured these tiny, incredibly delicious wild Italian strawberries. Some months later, I found an Italian strawberry plant at the farmers market and took it home and planted it. I nurtured those plants and they produced a bountiful harvest of maybe 20 tiny strawberries. About one good gulp. I kind of lost interest and the plant seemed to die over the winter.

As I began to plant the garden this Spring, there was a leafy plant that just started growing in one of the planters. I thought it was a weed or some variety of mint (it just takes over!) and left it for another day when I would do all of the planting. When that day came, and upon closer examination. I realized it was the strawberry plants. They had propagated from the other, now-dead strawberry plants and were now thriving. I’m going to have enough to make a proper dessert for sure.

The takeaway? I thought the strawberry plant was dead and gone. Just another failed experiment. The universe had other plans. I had to give up on a life that wasn’t meant for me. I had to come to terms with who I was and what I was really about. I opened my heart and let it begin to guide me. As I trusted my heart, as I began to live with courage and honesty, things began to change. The things that were meant for me began to find me. I began to be brave enough to accept those things.

It’s another rainy Friday and I’m pretty fatigued, but also content and peaceful. Sometimes I’m sad and feel empty, sometimes I’m happy and optimistic. These days, I’m always me, wherever that takes me. I do have a foolish heart and I’ve come to embrace that. I fall in love when I shouldn’t, I stay too long, I put myself in situations that I know can’t work out, I let myself feel things that I know will ultimately make me sad and maybe even hurt me. I love people who don’t really love me back.

None of this is a mistake.

The only mistake I make is when I fail to be myself. My foolish heart opens me up to all kinds of nonsense—but also adventure and amazing discoveries and a deeper appreciation of myself and the wondrous world around me. Hurt and heartbreak are essential components of the human experience. The mistakes I made were all made by following the wrong thing, not listening to myself, not listening to my heart.

My foolish heart has taken me so many places, maybe places I didn’t really want to visit, but I realize it was never to blame and never in vain. My foolish heart is working exactly the way it is meant to and sometimes that means breaking a little to make room for what I know is coming.

Happy Friday.