I spend time with the ocean.
When I visit her, we have conversations about life. I throw all of the pain and grief that has accumulated into the waves, and I talk to the people I’ve lost. We catch up, and I leave feeling cleansed and healed and whole.
I spent time with the ocean.
I traveled back in time in my thoughts as I walked along the water’s edge, back to when my struggles really began, to a fragile adolescence with big feelings and no skills to surf the waves.
I wouldn’t wish alcoholism on anyone. But…but…if I had it all to do over again, I don’t think I’d change a thing.
Do you remember the Kiefer Sutherland advertising campaign for Jose Cuervo? One of the taglines was, “Just don’t have any regrets.” That’s more than a little ambitious for a pusher of tequila, don’t you think? I have always assumed tequila was the Spanish word for regret. Has anyone ever started a night with, “lick it, slam it, suck its,” that didn’t end in regret? My life is chalked full of regrets, and more than a few of them can be directly attributed to Jose Cuervo.
Nothing strikes fear into the heart of a drinker who is considering quitting like a person with 30 years of sobriety who still attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. You mean he’s not fixed yet? He’s still got to attend these damn meetings to keep from drinking? What the sober curious don’t yet understand – what nobody outside the recovery community understands, frankly – is that sobriety is not a cure. Sobriety is a blessed lifestyle. Sobriety is how we humans were designed to function optimally.
Early sobriety is so complex that a guy could make a living writing about all the different components, challenges and associated stigmas. Oh wait, that’s what I’m trying to do. One of the greatest humps to get over for people new to sobriety is the idea that abstinence from a deadly poison is not, in fact, a punishment. Giving our bodies exercise, exposure to nature, connection with other humans, a sense of spirituality, plenty of sleep, intimate relationships, challenges to overcome and healthy food and beverage inputs is the key to happiness. Warping our brain function and destroying our organs is not exactly in the human body user’s manual.
I met a guy last week who saw Jesus in an IHOP. He had a serious drug problem (the guy I met, not Jesus), and he had been praying hard for God to help him. I guess I figure that if the way you are living your life is questionable enough for Jesus to meet you for pancakes, change is probably in order. The guy I met has been clean for two years now.
I don’t know what really happened in the IHOP that day, and neither do you. I believe God is with us, all around us always, and we choose, consciously or subconsciously, to let Him into our lives to varying degrees at varying times. How’s that for a concrete assessment of what happened at that IHOP?
But wait, there’s more!
I remember watching those TV advertisements as a kid. You know the ones – the offer just kept getting better and better. There where Ginsu Knives, the Slap Chop, some flashlight with a military grade beam strength (whatever that means) and a variety of non-stick pans with revolutionary coatings (that we eventually ingest as the coatings come off into our food over time).
The product didn’t really matter. The success of the commercial model was all in the anticipation and buildup. First, the announcer would demonstrate the product. Then he would throw in unexpected accessories. After that, the price would be slashed from what he told us we expected to pay. Last, he would make it a two for one deal if we called within the next ten minutes. BUT YOU MUST ACT NOW!
“Is that it?” came the question from one of our four kids sitting behind my wife and me in the last hundred miles of our road trip to the Grand Canyon. “No,” I replied as we passed a relatively small crack in the Arizona desert. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
When we saw it, the massive hole was bigger than any of us imagined. And flowing through the bottom of the canyon was the surprisingly modest Colorado River. The persistence required for that stream of water to cut that ginormous canyon over that amount of time – hundreds of millions of years – was too much for me to comprehend.
Let go and let God is the cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous. My rejection of this mantra is one of the main reasons AA never worked for me.
Let me be clear: I reject the slogan. I do not reject God. Quite to the contrary, actually. I have been a believer and practiced my faith to varying degrees my entire life. God is everything to me. I just don’t believe He wants us to hand Him the steering wheel of our life. I think He wants us to listen to His call and point ourselves in His chosen direction.
A reader contacted me last week and explained that he had five consecutive months of sobriety in 2017, but then decided he could handle drinking again. He didn’t go into detail, and I didn’t ask, but he told me 2018 ended very badly. He has been sober since New Year’s Day.
He asked me about my rock bottom. I told him about that and the many times I relapsed before I finally made it over the daunting and invisible hump to permanent sobriety. I shared my reading list of memoirs and brain chemistry explanations.
He would read one of my blog posts, comment about how strikingly similar his story was to mine, then ask me to point him to another of my posts from the past. This went on for some time, and it didn’t surprise me. There are lots of reasons people become addicted to alcohol, but the disease works basically the same for all of us. My reader was amazed to be reading his story in my words.
While we were discussing how I made it over that elusive hump, I told him that exactly one year prior, on January 10, 2018, I sent 3,000 emails – one to every email address I possessed – coming out about my alcoholism.
And that’s where my story and that of my reader diverged.
Christmas leaves me feeling like shit. It has for at least a couple of decades. I’m not talking about Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. I’m talking about the month or so that follows Christmas. It’s easy to point to January as a long, cold month devoid of major holiday festivities, and for many years, I blamed my post-Christmas blues on winter. A lot of people do. But that’s not it. Short days and cold temperatures don’t have much to do with it, really. My January dreariness is because I’ve been doing Christmas wrong.
I was watching a college soccer game last weekend, and it filled me with shame. My alma mater was playing, and playing very well. Indiana University was winning and looked like they might be well on their way to their ninth national championship. Soccer played at this high level should bring me joy, but instead, it shined a spotlight on my regret.
As I watched these players in pursuit of what I consider a noble goal, I couldn’t help but think of how I spent my time on that very same campus 25 years ago. I graduated in the spring of 1995 from the business school at Indiana with a 2.99 grade point average. How utterly poignant is that final GPA. It’s just a hair below a wildly underachieved B average. Of course, I always rounded it up for job interviews, but the truth is, it is a perfect symbol of time wasted wasted.