Senseless Urgency
Audio version now available.
When Sheri was pregnant with our first child, we decided we needed a safer, more sensible family-oriented car. Nothing like pregnancy to open our eyes to the death-tempting lifestyle we’d been socially conditioned to accept. You might have thought we were lion tamers or sword swallowers, not an inside sales representative and his bank-teller wife.
It must be fun to sell cars when a young couple enters the dealership with bright eyes and bushy tails, and maybe a little drool forming at the corners of their mouths to offset the sparkle of innocent naivety in their eyes. I came prepared with my internet printouts from the KBB website determined to get the best of my adversary in his clip-on tie and rubber-soled wingtips. We found a car we liked, and as we started the negotiation process, our salesman pointed to another couple sitting with one of his coworkers at a similar showroom desk. He said the couple was interested in the same car, and that it was the only one with those features in inventory. As Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” I think I offered $500 over sticker. The ink wouldn’t come out of the pen fast enough as I hastily wrote the biggest check of my young-adult life. My bride was impressed. With the salesman. Through the years, I justified my impetuous overpayment by reminding myself that the car had clearly protected our baby from all the untamed lions in Minnesota.
A sense of urgency is standard equipment on every new model of human that rolls off the uterine assembly line. If there were once people who lacked a gene for urgency, they didn’t make it through the evolutionary filter. When you are running from an untamed lion, you don’t have to be faster than the lion. You only have to have a stronger sense of urgency than someone else who doesn’t feel the need to run.
Sheri has a reasonable, mature sense of urgency. While on a walk over the weekend, our route included a long stretch of office buildings that were closed on Sunday, with one strip of restaurants that we assumed would be open. They were not. As soon as I pulled on the first locked door, Sheri’s sense of urinary urgency kicked in. I consider Sheri’s willingness to accept less-than-desireable toilet alternatives to be one of the top-ten things I most love about her. She once crouched next to the very car I overpaid for and whizzed on a gravel parking lot to avoid an unacceptably long bathroom line. So on Sunday, when we spotted a port-a-potty, I knew that crisis would, in fact, be averted. She might not be willing to sit in a disgusting portable toilet, but she holds her breath and hovers like a pro.
I recently listened to a radio interview of a reporter who was embedded in a militarily active part of Ukraine. He reported on an interesting dynamic of humans experiencing years of war. He explained that when the incoming missile sirens go off at 4am, people are to get out of bed and go to the underground train stations–the makeshift bomb shelters. He explained that after years of facing that decision in the dead of night, over and over again, many people pull a pillow over their ears and try to get back to sleep. How incredibly interesting that we humans can feel a greater sense of urgency about avoiding pee-soaked shorts than we feel about saving our own lives if the conditioning is sustained for long enough.
It just shows that in order for us to experience anxiety and nervous system activation associated with our sense of urgency, it doesn’t really matter what we feel urgently about.
I have a tuned-up sense of urgency. I can get over-amped about just about anything. A pebble stuck in the treads of our car tire that makes a little ticking sound as we drive along sends me into a panic. An unopened letter with an IRS regional office in the return address section of the envelope makes my pulse quicken. I pay our taxes in February every year because April feels risky, and I have a tire-repair kit that I’ve used successfully half-a-dozen times. I have nothing about which to worry. But my worrier, my sense of urgency, is world class.
Alcohol had a bidirectional toxic impact on my sense of urgency. In the moment, nothing turned the urgent into something-to-be-considered-on-another-day quite like a few drinks. I could have been terrified about the financial viability of our bakery business–the only source of income we had to protect our four children from untamed lions…and starvation–one minute, and mindlessly watching African safari videos on Nat Geo the next. If, that is, I started drinking between those two minutes. Alcoholics talk about not possessing an off switch for consumption once we start drinking. But the alcohol served as my only off switch to a bunch of behaviors that often ran on overdrive. Like my sense of urgency. I said I was just going to relax and have a few drinks. More accurately, I was going to temporarily stifle that otherwise uncontrollable panic vibrating in my bones.
As effective as it is in turning off my sense of urgency, alcohol also prevented me from growing a natural off switch. Or dimmer switch, even. Alcoholism is widely associated with a lack of emotional maturity. One such emotion is a sense of calm. You know, the knowledge that even though the refrigerator compressor is making a new, disconcerting sound, that everything will, in fact, be OK. For an alcoholic not currently drinking alcohol, a loudly humming refrigerator compressor might as well be a Ukrainian incoming missile siren.
I’m better now. Time is helpful. I’m approaching a decade of sobriety, and I rolled off the uterine assembly line way back in 1973. My wife might be able to offer some compelling evidence against any claim I could make to emotional maturity, but I am pretty good at looking around and convincing myself that if I’ve made it this far, the unexplainable dead patch on our front lawn is unlikely to take me out. It is comforting to know that in 200 years, no one, not even my descendents, will know who I was. That helps me realize that my work doesn’t mean shit. You might be surprised how comforting that knowledge is when I am up against a deadline.
I drive an open-top Jeep now. That’s the kind of bold, fearless guy I have matured (or devolved) into. I know how brazenly I am tempting a herd of untamed Minnesota lions to migrate to Colorado. Come find me. I’ll be the one driving around topless even in winter.
Urgently senseless.
If your sense of urgency operates on overdrive, and now that you’re leaving alcohol behind, you could benefit from interaction with people who understand, please consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety.