I’m grateful for a really busy day. I’m grateful for the “small twist in a cone” from Ralph’s on 1st avenue. I’m grateful for seeing that the essential skill is loosening, not tightening. I’m grateful for seeing connections. I’m grateful to be sober today.
Okay, first things first. Randy Travis is not dead. Alert subscriber Bert S. promptly pointed this out and he was and is 100% correct. The best thing about this is when you google “Randy Travis,” the story that comes up, that very much proves his non-deadness, is that a long-time stage manager was shot dead by his wife on Randy T’s front porch. Mrs. Stage Hand apparently wished her husband had paid more attention to the lyrics of “On the Other Hand,” because she was definitely someone “who would not understand.”
I’ve written a lot about “willingness” as one of the central concepts of sobriety; really, it’s a central concept of any attempt to change anything about one’s self. In Big Book terms, it was the willingness to believe that there “might” be a Higher Power that started the snowball rolling down the mountain. Willingness, the suspension of what was previously believed, is a very, very powerful tool. I’m coming to see how willingness is not a tool that is just useful in completing Steps Two and Three.
The Big Book imperative to widen and deepen my spiritual life is designed to keep that very pernicious, aggressive weed (my alcoholically-wired brain) from choking off the garden of sobriety. As you know, weeding a garden is not a one-time thing. I could digress and tell you how a young TBD and an even younger brother were put into service walking my Uncle’s soybean fields and pulling Cocklebur plants. This was done on a daily basis during our “visits.” Even our own modest garden at home required what I thought was a shit-ton of weeding.1 The younger brother actually agreed to a sucker’s offer from my mom: one cent for each dandelion or weed he dug up from the front yard. That’s a lot of dandelions before you have enough to make a decent candy run.2
The point being, running my same routine, day after day, might not be enough. Having a routine is a critical element of sobriety, establishing that framework of personal accountability is something that makes a ton of difference. But once things get a little more stable and one has a bit of sobriety under the belt, I think that can be a dangerous spot and I think it requires willingness to navigate.
There is this idea that evolution doesn’t work on a smooth, continuous basis, there’s not a time-lapse video showing how single-cell life became weird toad things became weird dinosaurs became monkeys became humans. The idea is that what really happens is something called “punctuated equilibrium.” Meaning that things change and change, but tend to reach stable plateaus for some periods of time, things reach equilibrium temporarily, then something changes and then everything changes again.
I think that’s a pretty apt way to look at sobriety. There is the initial rush of getting sober, the pink cloud, the relief, the ebbing away of fear, it feels really, really great. Then, life comes rushing back in and now sobriety is kind of like going to the gym, something you know is important and you need to do more of, but there is just so much else going on. Or, it’s been a couple of years and things are really good and there is a routine, a few meetings, maybe some sponsee stuff, but again, it can become just a component of life.
I guess as I reflect on my sobriety, I realize it depends less on my external routine and more on my interior monologue. Meaning, integrating the concepts of the Program into my thinking, into the way I approach life, seems to have more to do with my continued sobriety than the five minutes of mediation I strive for on a daily basis. I guess what I’m trying to say is this, for me, those rituals, routines, simply place me in the right mental state. It’s like booting up a computer, it’s important that go correctly, all of the processes get loaded and executed in the right order, but then it’s what I do with that alcoholic brain computer for the rest of the day that really matters.
Willingness is also at the core of the continued inventory-taking process that’s set out in the Maintenance Steps (“Living in 10, 11 and 12,” I love that). “Am I sure I did the right thing?” It occurs to me that willingness is a concept that doesn’t just drive sobriety, it drives happiness. It’s not just being willing to try a different flavor of ice cream at Ralph’s or not ordering pancakes for breakfast at the diner every single time. It means being willing to challenge myself, my assumptions and the way that I look at the world and myself. As an alcoholic, I got a lot of stuff very wrong. My head generated conspiracies and affronts faster than even I could keep up with them. That will still happen, and does, if I let things go a bit, forget to do the weeding. The willingness to challenge my own beliefs, my own assumptions is important because the thing that got me here was my ability to lie to myself.
The very excellent primer on alcoholism by Marty Mann identifies lying to oneself as one of the very early symptoms of nascent alcoholism. One of the very first ways we lie to ourselves is about the nature, extent and importance of our drinking. And, news flash, that’s not the only thing I’m willing to lie to myself about. That’s the point of willingness, I think, to stop thinking my own thoughts and let a little reality pervade the dark conspiracy factory.
Being willing to believe that people actually do respect me, that they do appreciate and care about me, that most terrible situations that involve me weren’t directed at me, that a lot of what happens in the world around me isn’t actually about me. Does that make me feel insignificant? Like I don’t matter? No, exactly the opposite. It frees me up to do what I’m probably supposed to do, whatever that is. It frees me up to be me and see what happens. It frees me up to consider that maybe a little change would be a good thing.
I lived in a pretty dark place for a pretty long time. Willingness seems like a small price to pay to let the light in—it’s actually no price at all. Willingness let me jettison the self-determined things of importance and opened me up to the amazing possibilities of “what is.” Willingness is what lets me see the world the way I think I’m supposed to look at it.
I know I overuse the word “groovy,” but how else would you describe it?
I say this as the person who was apparently responsible for ensuring a weed-free environment.
“I could digress?” hahahaha
Spot on...TFS. You are a fantastic writer & thinker🤔. Have a great day!
When I work with people, one of the things I say as a way of gaining permission to shatter their lens temporarily... "Are you WILLING to try on another possibility, and see what it's like?"
There's a lot to say about willingness. And also to distinguish it from 'trying hard'. There's no effort in willingness - just innocence and humility. I think that's 99% of any real 'personal growth' - rediscovering out innocence and humility, that we lost somewhere on our way to adulthood.