---by S.A. Barton
When it comes to yourself, knowing causes can be a good thing. It can be vital, really. And it is easy to get lost in the investigation, as well. Like so many good ideas, this sword has the proverbial double edge.
As an alcoholic, I looked for causes of my state for a long time, often while drinking, occasionally while sober (or at least not drinking). At one time or another I identified various experiences and people in my past upon whom I could hang… if not blame, then causation. Oh, my problems came from this person and that event.
Well, some of my thinking had some merit. My abusive relationship with an intoxicant did, in a way, spring out of some negative experiences and how I related to them. That last part is the key. How I related to them. The actions were mine, and the actions it took to recover, in the end, had to be mine. I needed help, guidance, and support from others with experience in recovery and from others who loved me or at least cared about me.
But for a long, ugly, drunken time, that ‘how I related to them’ part was something I glossed over, something I willfully ignored. I focused on the events and the people, and on my emotional responses to them. I looked over my past with all of the obsession that I had for drink, parsing and analyzing the events, reliving them, warping the negatives there into gigantic, funhouse mirror images of themselves, and losing all of the good, positive people and events.
That’s what I mean by being lost in knowing. I took knowing to be an end in itself, and it turned into an endless labyrinth through which I flailed ever more desperately, looking for a way out of my alcoholic life.
Once I accepted that my knowledge was a means rather than an end, that acceptance could guide me to release the obsession with the knowledge itself, to the actions that have given me more than four years of sober, productive life… and perhaps many more, so long as I do not lose myself in knowing again.
“I’m an Atheist, and I’m addicted to _____. I’m desperate for recovery. I hear 12-step works for a lot of people… but what the hell do I do when I get to all that god stuff?”
This is a question I hear in one form or another in 12-step meetings. It’s a question I had when I started this recovery thing. The answer I got was essentially to put it on the back burner and keep an open mind; to do what I could do today and let tomorrow take care of itself tomorrow. Really, it was a good answer. I was all kinds of screwed up coming in, as are most people with long-standing substance-abuse problems. Shut up and start walking the path was an excellent suggestion, and I took it. I really needed to start working first rather than trying to answer all of the potential future questions.
But of course, sooner or later that god thing came back to be dealt with. That’s fine, by the time I really had to sit down and do some thinking my head was screwed on a little tighter by virtue of the simple fact that my brains were no longer soaking in an alcohol solution and I had learned to listen to others a little more closely than before. The G word crops up often in 12-step literature, you hear it constantly in meetings, people talk about it before and after, and if you get in there and start working the steps, it shows up in step 2 (came to believe a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity) and names itself in step 3 (made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of god as we understood him).
So, here’s how I made sense of it. This is my experience, and I do not represent any recovery group, 12-step or otherwise.
Despite not believing in any gods of any sort, I realized that I had been behaving like the god-figures of most (all?) mythologies.
I was egotistical. I was demanding. I expected my needs and wants to take a higher priority than those of others. I expected people to know what I wanted with0ut me telling them. I expected people to ask me for what they needed or wanted and to be grateful if I gave it to them. I expected them to express that gratitude. I expected that others would understand when I was grateful to them without my having to be bothered telling them. I expected to be given things, and I expected that I would give nothing back unless it was convenient and it was something I didn’t want anyway. Or, of course, if what you were giving me in return was of more value.
When events and even natural processes didn’t go my way, I was angry. Deep down, I expected the world to bend itself around my desires. I expected my environment to adapt to me rather than me adapting to my environment.
An atheist acting like a petty godlet. It’s pretty funny, when you think about it.
So, believing a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. That’s easy. The whole damn world is greater than me. You’re greater than me in a very key way: I cannot alter your thoughts or behaviors. You can do something I have absolutely no power over. I can present an idea to you; what you then do with it is absolutely yours. To lend a crude metaphor to this idea, I am a child playing a boardgame. The rules of the boardgame govern the boardgame. If I accept this, I can have a good time playing. If I don’t accept this, I will have an unhappy tantrum and be sent to bed where I will cry and sniffle… but the rules of the game will remain unchanged. Understanding this idea indeed brought some sanity back into my life. I continue to ponder it from time to time. This is a basic principle of life, not an item on a scavenger hunt list to be ticked off and forgotten. As I continue to ponder it, my understanding deepens and my sanity grows. Like many simple things, the ramifications are greater than you can follow in their entirety, so spend your life with it.
But, you might ask, if there’s nothing there, no sentient god, how do you get restored to sanity? Again, simple. A tide lifts a boat without being asked and without being sentient. Meet the conditions: place a boat on a tidal body of water. Wait. Then it happens. Be open to understanding the principles that govern your world and do your best to act in harmony with them, do your best not to waste your energy in trying to change the things you cannot change, turn your efforts to identifying and changing the things that can be changed, and the tide will lift your boat. Simple, no?
Once you get that, step 3 is nothing. I didn’t even really care that the word ‘god’ was in it. Other than my mild irritation at mythological references, but then that’s natural for an atheist. All step 3 really is, is a statement of willingness to integrate the understanding I gained from step 2 into my life, every day, all day. Not because I’m some spiritually athletic special forces badass, not because I’m all awesome all of a sudden, but because it’s practical. It’s understanding that the tide will lift my boat when it will lift it tomorrow as well as today, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on the tide tables.
I made a decision to play the boardgame by the rules, and to understand that the rules do not alter themselves for me no matter how pissed off I get. You can call that ‘god’ if you want.
I call it good sense.
Let’s admit it: we like punishment. We like to think that the guy who cut us off in traffic came down with a bad case of four flat tires as soon as he got out of our sight. That the guy who stole our car radio dropped it and broke his foot with it. That the person who wouldn’t take that late fee off of our credit card account is going home tonight to discover a large, unexpected, and highly distressing bill. That the jerk who we watched kick his dog at the park is going to fall down an escalator tomorrow and break both of his legs.
We also like to think that good is rewarded. Mostly in terms of the good we do. Hey, I put a buck in the jar for Jerry’s Kids, when does my winning lottery ticket show up? But much more than we think of that, in general, we think of punishment for the bad that goes on in the world. Because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of it. It’s bad enough that it’s happening, but the thought that people are getting away with some of this stuff? Intolerable.
We call it god(s), karma*, what goes around comes around, what ye reap so shall ye sow.
And it bugs the crap out of us… out of ME… when it doesn’t look like it’s working. All too often, the dog-kicker goes home to kick his dog some more. And then the neighbor says, “oh, yes, I believe he’s been kicking his dogs for thirty years or more”. And that really sucks.
It’s tempting to think that sometime, even after death or in the next life, this dog-kicking jackass is going to get his comeuppance. Very tempting.
It’s not that simple. It’s simpler.
Look around. Look at the dog kickers. Look at the dog petters, too. Nothing stops dog kicking. The fact is, the only thing the universe requires of you to do a thing is that you have the power to do it. That is it. All there is.
The world is not fair. Nothing exerts some sort of power to make the scales balance. Nothing metes out punishment for the bad, or rewards for the good. There is no god, no karma.
But.
When I said it’s simpler than we want to think, I meant it. The fact is, nothing will guarantee the results of a single action, for good or for ill. Sometimes the only punishment a dog kicker will have is having to live as a dog kicker. Do you think that’s a happy life, a fulfilling one, an enjoyable one?
Good rewards itself; right actions yield positive results… on average, over time. No guarantees on your particular single action. The flip side is true also. It’s not magic, there’s nothing making it happen. Just as fruit ripens in the sun or withers in frost, so does your own life ripen or wither depending on the environment you make for it.
So go out and kick no dogs. It’s for your own good.
*Yes, I know the Buddhist concept of karma is not about punishment. But let’s face it, a lot of people think of it that way.
I don’t like screwing up.
I was going to follow that sentence with a handy list of stuff I’ve screwed up or could screw up, but how do you pick and choose? I mean, if I include ‘making a typo’, then ‘picking the wrong word altogether’ will feel left out… and that’s only one example. There are BAZILLIONS.
Look, this isn’t an earth-shattering idea. You could probably just stop at the first sentence and get the gist of this. That’s probably a big writing screwup. I’m supposed to string you along for a couple of paragraphs and get your attention engaged before dropping a super-simple idea like that. All the best marketing screeds say so. Or I imagine they do; I’ve heard enough out of them, I don’t read that crap.
The point is, I don’t like screwing up and neither do you. There are very sound reasons for this. You have a billion-plus years’ worth of ancestors right down to the level of ‘virus’ that lived by not screwing up in a life-or-death situation. That’s a lot of pressure from the old family tree. Sometimes, a screwup gets you dead.
Luckily, most screwups aren’t that intense. But they’re still there. And we respond to them in a variety of ways. Some of those ways annoy the crap out of me. I’ll stick to the one that annoys me the most, probably because I’ve practiced it myself in the past and boy was it a big screwup whenever I did.
I’ll call this screwup, Now I Have It Totally Right.
It’s an easy one to drift into, because screwing up gets old. We do it every day. It doesn’t help that we THINK we’ve screwed up when all we’ve really done is choose one option or action from a menu that doesn’t include a ‘correct’ choice. Like, do I get cheese on my burger or not? I go with cheese, I eat it, I think, gee, I would have liked that better without cheese, I screwed up. Oh, seriously, self: shut up. It was just a choice, there wasn’t a right answer.
But I was talking about having it totally right. Unlocking the secret to life, basically. Thinking doing X is the perfect thing, knowing Y is the perfect knowledge, acquiring item Z is the perfect acquisition to end all acquisitions.
Bullshit.
The closest thing to a perfect way to live is knowing there is no perfect way to live. The closest thing to the secret of life is there is no secret of life. The perfect knowledge is that there is no perfect knowledge. The perfect acquisition is knowing there is no perfect acquisition.
There’s a lot not to like here. I WANT there to be a perfect thing that, if I know it or practice it, ‘solves’ every ‘problem’. But one problem there is not everything is a problem. Another problem is that this seems to leave you adrift. There’s comfort in having everything nailed down once and for all. How the hell do you do anything if there are no right answers, no right choices? How do I know if I should get cheese on that burger?
I’ve got news for you: you’re doing it already; you’re already adrift. The only question is, are you screwing it up by thinking you’ve got no room for improvement? Do you think you’ve got it all right?
*This is a link to a book I like, on Amazon. I am not compensated in any way for putting it here, for clicks on it, or if you choose to purchase the thing. I just like the book.
‘Illusion’ is a word that gets knocked around quite a bit. It has a bad reputation; it’s a trickster, a bad egg. But really, it’s just another description for something humans experience and do. It’s really a pretty neutral thing. It describes anything that doesn’t have a literal existence, but influences us nonetheless. Like just about anything, it’s only negative when we choose to use and interpret it in a negative way.
Take money, for example. Just not mine, please. Money is a big fat illusion. Whether your money is a piece of paper or a big fat wad of gold, it’s an illusion. I don’t mean the physical marker you have in your hand is an illusion, I mean its value is an illusion. That paper bill only has worth if the person you’re handing it to agrees it has worth. The same goes for gold. Wait… gold is always valuable, you say. It has been for thousands of years. That can’t be an illusion, right?
Wrong. Imagine we’re both lost in the desert. You have a gallon of water, I have a pound of gold. There’s no rescue in sight. I offer you the gold. Do you give me the water? Well, maybe you do. And maybe I walk out of the desert, hydrated, and send someone back to look for your desiccated corpse. If so, I guess the illusion of worth was a persistent one for you.
We live and die by illusions. Social status is an illusion. Human society is an illusion. Love and friendship are illusions. Feelings of charity or greed are illusions. Philosophy is an illusion. They are not real things. And they are very real. One of the first lessons we learn about illusion is that illusions have a lot of influence on us. This is not good or bad, it is our actions, our reactions, that may be good or may be bad.
This thing I call the Tao, the Way, is an illusion as well. It does not exist, and it means a great deal. Once I realized that, and began to understand just how much of our experience is based on illusion, things began to make sense to me.
Not because I “saw through the illusion to the real Truth”. That’s a load of bullshit people try to foist on other people in exchange for money; we call that either ‘self-help seminars’ or ‘religion’ for the most part. There are other monickers. ‘Drugs’, for example, which I have some experience of in the alcohol form. Drunk, I sure thought I was cutting right down to the bone of “Truth”… but I was just chasing an unhelpful illusion.
Seeing the truth is not seeing through illusion, it is seeing the many and varied illusions that are part of you for what they are, what they are good for, and what they are not good for. Illusion is part of this ‘being sentient’ thing we humans all share. Whatever your ‘Way’ is, if you understand this, you will find your path much, much easier to walk.
I’d like you to try something. Go outside, walk into the middle of the nearest lawn or meadow* and pluck a single blade of grass. Then go back inside.
Look at that blade of grass. Look real close. Look at the texture of the edge of the blade, the (probably) millions of super-fine serrations. The central vein, the tiny parallel veins. The green: is it completely uniform, or are there subtle variations from the tip to the root and from the center to the edge? Has it been nicked by some animal or being folded under a foot, has it been hacked off short by a lawnmower, is the very tip browned by a recent rainless stretch? Does it show that it has been damaged, then healed, and continued growing?
It’s pretty unique now that you think about it, isn’t it?
Wait until morning. Now go back outside and look for where you got it. Pick out the exact spot, and fit your blade of grass into the gap. Go ahead. I’ll wait…
You can’t find it, can you? There’s too much grass, all over the damn place. No matter how unique it is, it is also the same.
This, of course, describes me and you. I don’t know you (or if I do, I don’t know you’re reading this right now), so I’ll talk about me.
I am unique and special. I am shorter than some and taller than others, wider or thinner. My eyes are a different color from some but not others… look very closely and you will see bands and flecks and variations in patterns that are unlikely to be identical in any two humans you pick out. What I think about, how and when and why I think it and what I do about it; these things describe a pattern of thought that is mine and not yours. You probably haven’t done the things I’ve done in the order and for the reasons I’ve done them.
And yet, there’s a whole lawn full of us, seven billion of us, all remarkably alike. Like everyone else, I am stunningly different and stunningly identical. Because of the miracle of language, that looks like a paradox, but it is not even close. It is just a description of reality.
Don’t waste time trying to convince others that you are unique, or that you are just like them. Those qualities are already there, inherent in the fact of your existence. How you interpret that reality is up to you. At times in my life, I have been overwhelmed with despair at being too different, too unique, too much an outsider to be understood, to be a part of society. I have also been overwhelmed with despair at being too identical, too indistinguishable, doomed to be an invisible part of the lawn and nothing more.
I find it suits me far better to simply let these things take care of themselves, and live my life as best as I am able. That means that I am both a unique blade of grass and an indistinguishable part of the lawn simultaneously. Just the same as I was when I was despairing. Nothing changed, except the degree of happiness I live with.
*No trespassing while you’re at it. This really isn’t worth getting into trouble over.
People have a way of being very specific about things. Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t. As always, it is up to each of us to pay attention to how we are thinking, how we are relating to the world, to catch ourselves when we aren’t making sense. Also as always, it helps to have some sounding boards. If all of your sounding boards think the same way as you do, you may find yourself thinking some very odd things. Which is why we may see a religious community or a political community, or a knitting circle for that matter, acting in ways that defy reality. Because somewhere along the way they shed the practice of looking at viewpoints other than those that agree with their own, and descended into becoming oddly specific.
When we become oddly specific, beliefs become solid, verified truths to us. Even when the universe doesn’t seem to agree. To draw an example from religion, Galileo observed the movements of the moons of Jupiter and concluded that such movement verified Copernicus’ assertion that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than vice-versa. The response of the church was to denounce Galileo, arrest him, force him to recant his statements, and place him on house arrest.
Because they already ‘knew’ the ‘truth’, and a verifiable fact was seen as a threat. Think about that for a moment.
Some people had an idea about the way the universe worked, and when observation told them that their idea was not correct, they denied the observation to defend their idea, and abused the messenger.
This is what happens when you begin with a conclusion and proceed to observation. You miss important ideas, you fail to learn, and people get hurt. It is a natural consequence of denying reality in favor of preserving a cherished belief. No matter what that belief is. It need not involve religion or philosophy at all. If you begin balancing your checkbook with the belief that you have a thousand dollars in the bank and act to prove your belief rather than acting to find out how much money you have right now…
…the bank and your creditors will not be amused when your checks bounce.
It’s better to begin with observation and proceed to a conclusion. And even then, understand that you may not have all of the information, or you may have made a mistake. Once you have reached a conclusion, be open to discovering that there is more.
And especially, don’t let yourself get tunnel vision.
Do you really want to miss seeing the nude sunbathers just because since they weren’t eating waffles you concluded they must not be nude and didn’t look? What a tragedy!
I was an angry man. I am an angry man. I was an angry child. The source of this is simple. I wanted to live in a world that was fair, and the world is not fair. I wanted the world to be kind to me, and the world is not kind. It is not unkind, either. But I wanted the things I wanted, and when the world didn’t give them to me for the asking, I decided I didn’t much care for its attitude.
I mostly kept this anger under wraps. Locked down. Like a pressure cooker. And like a pressure cooker full of boiling water, from time to time the relief valve blew, and a jet of turbulent anger blasted forth, burning anyone who stood too near. Considering how long I kept the heat on, it’s simple chance that it did not shatter, that I am not dead or insane*. No biggie, that’s just the truth. I hope you’re not too emotional about it. I’m mostly not these days. I’m used to it now.
In the last few years I have taken up, as is all too familiar to anyone who has been reading here for any length of time, 12 step recovery as well as a layman’s practice of philosophical Taoism. Either one of those things, not to mention getting the hell off of the sauce, has a reputation for producing some fairly sunny dispositions. And I AM sunnier than I used to be. But the anger isn’t gone.
How could it be? I grew up with it. It’s as much a part of me as the day I learned to ride a bike, the day I vomited blood, the day I married my wife. It is… like one egg in a three egg omelet. It cannot be separated, it would be impossible to begin.
So where is this part of me now? Once in a while, it does come out in the old way, and I lose my cool. In the old days I ranted about whatever it was for a day or two, probably broke a thing or two dramatically slamming it on a countertop or throwing it across the room, went out and drove like a dangerous idiot, made a big ranting spectacle of myself like some sort of drag queen of emotion. Now I verbally rant for five minutes, perhaps throw something that cannot be damaged like a piece of clothing, say a dirty word or two, and then think.
That’s when I lose my cool… now. So yeah, no perfection here. But my mind is on progress… I see no point in pronouncing it good and accepting the current state of affairs. If my rants are five minutes, perhaps next month or next year they can be three. Perhaps one day they might be down to a single ‘dammit’. Who knows? I don’t.
But mainly, it’s just different. From childhood, when my anger was upon me I hid it, denied it, tried to shut it out until it exploded. And I never thought it would explode until it did. No matter how many times I lost control, I persisted in thinking my control would be absolute, that this time would be different.
After a while with the Tao and the 12 steps, I stopped denying it. I acknowledged it was a part of me and not some alien other that possessed me and made me do unpleasant things. I no longer tried to cast it out, no longer tried to lock it away inside.
I let it out. Just not in a tantrum. I sit it down and ask it what the hell it thinks it is doing and why.
So, the anger is still there. It still comes. I still feel it. But it is different. It is not the old anger that knocked me down and stomped me like a wild horse stomps a cowboy who loses his grip.
Now, when my head is on straight, I leap on its back and it surges under me like a loyal stallion, all power and purpose. Because that’s what anger is when my head is on straight. Not anger at all, but power and purpose.
They’re the same thing. Anger is what happens when you try to deny your power and your purpose. Power and purpose are there to accomplish the things you can accomplish, to change the things that can be changed. 12-steppers call this ‘the proper use of the will’. When you aim power and purpose at something they can’t change, it is like aiming a river at a dam with no outlet. The currents tangle, they roil and boil, they tear at the banks and the riverbed, they claw for the top of the dam until something gives or they overflow. And then look out downstream.
Anger is what you get when you know there’s something you can do about what’s on your mind… or you know that there’s probably something if only you can figure out what… and you don’t do it.
When anger comes, raging is simply unproductive. You need to find it something to do, something related to the source of your anger… because that is the work it came here to do, that is the goal that your power and purpose are frustrated from, the dam that tangles the currents of productivity into a destructive force.
Follow that idea, and one day you will ask the question in the title. And your answer will be, it didn’t go anywhere. It is simply being what it was meant to be in the first place.
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For a little more illumination, here is a story that can easily be read as one of a man who has learned to live with his purpose and power: The Waterfall. (opens in new window or tab)
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*At least I think I’m not. You’ll have to decide for yourself.
Get up, go for a drive. If you’re new to it, you probably think about where you put your hands– 2 and 10 o’clock? You check the parking brake twice. Adjust the already adjusted mirrors. Think, is my foot on the brake? before you turn the key. Let the clutch out slowly, slowly… is that enough gas? Is it too much? Or do you even know what the hell a clutch is? Clutches are hard, you’re probably in an automatic. You still look twice to make sure you’re in D instead of 1.
You’re really new to this. You’re practicing in a parking lot.
Fast forward a few years. You hop in, fire it up, buzz down the road to the highway and think nothing of diverting some of your attention from what those SUVs are doing in the next lane and that delivery truck behind you is up to so you can look at the pretty fall colors on the maple up ahead.
It’s nothing like a parking lot, and it’s nothing like driving was before.
You look at the past and you think, I was stupid. You can’t believe you acted like that, afraid of the other cars, the road, your own car. Muttering turn signal, check mirrors, accelerate slightly to yourself when you changed lanes. Or that time you drove six blocks in low gear with the e-brake on because you just forgot. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Why does anyone do that? Why did you do that?
You’ve forgotten that the start is at the start and it looks like starting. You’ve forgotten where you came from, and that means you’ve forgotten where you are. Which is why you’re following the car with the Student Driver sign on top too close, making the poor kid behind the wheel hunch way up toward the dash, making his knuckles turn white.
You’ve forgotten when your knuckles turned white. Because the beginner is an embarrassment to the experienced. Because the experienced one who remembers beginning is embarrassed.
Why be embarrassed? Everyone begins. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has a moment of carelessness, of overcaution, of forgetting, of remembering the right thing… but in the wrong situation.
If you let go of your worry of embarrassment, of your need to feel superior, you can nurture the learner instead of cursing him. No matter if he’s driving his car, or yours.
As little as four years ago, I knew I would never be like the man in this picture. Because he has a child.
Four years ago I was in what would turn out to be the tail end of a struggle with addiction from the inside. I was obsessed with alcohol. Though I wanted to put other things first, alcohol came first in all things for me. I would try to put my friends, my promises, my family first. Really, honestly try. But whatever I knew I should be doing, somehow it always became more important that I be drunk. I drank because I was unhappy and I was unhappy because I drank, and I did not know how to break the cycle. My obsession brought me to see the cycle itself as the problem, to see alcohol as the thing to blame, but it was only a tool. It was a fast, easy way to forget my unhappiness for a time, and like most things that are fast and easy it provided only a temporary, unsatisfactory fix that failed to address the real issues.
Since I could not yet see that, I saw instead a quick, easy explanation. An excuse, really.
I was simply a broken, fatally flawed human being. Something was wrong with my body and my mind; something organic and unfixable. As such, I believed that it was my duty not to pass those terrible flaws on to another generation. I would let them die with me. I thought that four years ago when I was a binge alcoholic, nine years ago when I began drinking like that, fourteen years ago when I got out of the hospital and began five years of white-knuckle sobriety with no help, support, or counseling, nineteen years ago when I began the daily alcoholic drinking that would land me in the hospital near death kicking off that white-knuckle experience.
For nearly twenty years it was easier to believe that I was simply defective. Because then I would not have to do the work it takes to be a decent human being. For me, somehow, ‘work’ was something bad, something unenjoyable, something forced upon a person. If I had to work for it, it wasn’t worth having.
I carried a right view of work with me the whole time and never saw it. When I believed I had a good reason to work, I always worked hard. When I enjoyed what I was doing, I worked hard. I have read thousands of books because I enjoyed them and valued their message; are reading and analyzing and remembering not work? I have fixed broken cars and tilled gardens and potted plants, written and executed fantasy role-playing adventures for others and are those things not work? I pursued and earned an academic degree, and is that not work?
I have chased a lonely death I thought I deserved through pain and deprivation and fear, defying negative experience after negative experience… and that was definitely work, let me tell you.
I always felt something was wrong, something was off. Because, I suppose, it was staring me in the face. I am a fairly perceptive person, it takes a lot of work also to deny the obvious. That there was nothing wrong with me. That the wrong in my life was the result of making the superficially easy choice for the sake of fast results over and over again.
The wrong in my life wasn’t alcohol at all. It was in refusing to acknowledge that I was a worthwhile human being. It was in refusing to acknowledge that accepting the responsibility to foster the good in myself was what I needed, not a quick fix from a bottle.
It was in refusing to acknowledge that I could live up to the man in that picture after all. Refusing to acknowledge that I was not somehow doomed to failure. Refusing to acknowledge that I, after all, had something to give.
A little over three and a half years ago, I began to work. By working a program of recovery from addiction, I came to realize that I was not broken and worthless, but had merely buried my worth.
That man up there, my father, was not a perfect man. He made mistakes. Doing the best he knew how, he still made mistakes. My mother is the same. Doing her best, she still made mistakes. Humans do that. Because we are human. Once I resented the mistakes, because I simply did not accept what it means to be human. I wanted reality to be different; I wanted to challenge it. That generally doesn’t work out too well, and it didn’t.
Mistakes used to terrify me; they still worry me at times. They should concern us, or we will forget to avoid the ones we can. But I used to obsess over them. When I was drinking, I did not think I should have a child simply because I would be human like my parents and make mistakes. That’s the bottom line, beneath all of the explanations. And yesterday I learned that I have a son due to be born in three months.
Somehow, I’m not terrified. I know I will do my best. I know my wife will as well. I know we will make mistakes, and some day our child will ask why. Because that’s another things humans do.
Life is going to happen, and the bottom line is when I committed to living in recovery from alcoholism, I committed to living. Perhaps for the first time in my life, a conscious commitment to accept everything that means, uncertainty, mistakes, and all. Not just to accept it, but to embrace it and love it.
That’s what is waiting for little negative-three-month-old Victor. Acceptance, love, and the knowledge that life is uncertain, that the unexpected will happen and that we will all do our genuine best with it. What else is it all about?
