The Tao of Chaos

Set your mind at ease, I don’t mean that literally.  It’s obviously not good to go out and do terrible things.  What I’m talking about is the disturbing tendency for evil to creep into goodness, for wrong to stain right, negativity to come from positivity.

I’m not talking about the whole yin-yang thing, that’s really kind of miscast when it comes to good and evil.  That concept is more about the cyclical nature of active and passive aspects in the world, not about good and evil.  But I assure you, each carries the seeds of the other.  That’s just how it is.

Definitely not evil.

What I am talking about is the old, old saw about the road to hell being paved with good intentions.  Which brings me to the Hitlerjugend poster heading this entry.  Hitler, to godwin my own post, totally thought he was a good guy.  Read his book, he’ll tell you from across the gulf of history.  He wrote about himself as an instrument of god, doing holy work.  In his own mind, he was fighting the forces of evil, saving good people, and righting ancient wrongs.

And of course, he was doing it for the children.  Just look at that poster, that heroic boy gazing off into a wonderful future.  And somehow Hitler, his cohorts, and a significant portion of the German people of the time thought all this really made sense.  Even well into the carpet bombing.

It’s not a German thing, it’s a human thing.  And of course I’m using a very extreme example for effect.  But it is very easy for good intentions to go bad.  All you have to do is try to force them.  Our society… and I think I’m talking about just any society, so wherever you live, I’m talking about yours… is constantly beset by temptations to force things.  I’m familiar with U.S. culture, so I’ll deal with that.

We prohibited alcoholic beverages a little less than a century ago.  That ended up solidifying and funding organized crime syndicates, producing gang wars, plenty of poisonings due to unregulated and illicit production, and fostering a level of distrust between our citizens and law enforcement officials unseen until then and which I think has not yet faded even today.  The war on drugs produces similar results.  Society is moving towards banning tobacco.  I have a feeling that just might fan the flames further.

I’m not trying to say any good intended action will inevitably lead to evil.  I’m also not saying there is no place for rules and laws.  There certainly are, they have a certain utility when you have millions of people rubbing elbows, producing food and widgets, and trying to communicate, travel, and exchange things.

Order, however, has a way of begging more order.  Laws invite more laws.  Restrictions birth more restrictions.  There’s always a tweak to protect a few more people or another thing.  They gather until they are a straitjacket, and then you have a whole bunch of pissed off people rubbing elbows with each other and suddenly they want things to change.

Which leads either to a very exciting election or a war.  I know which I prefer.

The unfortunate truth, from an emotional standpoint, is that the world is dangerous.  People will make foolish choices, hurt themselves, even kill themselves from time to time.  All the laws in the world will not stop this.  But we like to think they might.  There are quite a few people out there who are looking for the magic law that will save the children, the new world order that will make them safe.  And it’s just not out there.  The productive laws, provided they do not become too numerous to keep track of or too complex to understand, regulate or inform.  Like anything, they can go wrong as well.  But the coercive ones, the ones that are drawn in black and white, that absolutely forbid or compel, they start out wrong**.  And it doesn’t take long for the whole of society to begin to reflect the wrong.

I guess, once you get right down to it, societies are a lot like individual human beings.  The wrong action for the right reason leads you right to hell.

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**OK, I’ll admit I’m kind of a fan of the ones coercively prohibiting murder, rape, and other nasties like that.  I guess there really are no absolutes.

When I was drinking, this was my favorite painting: Christina’s World, by Wyeth.  It still is actually.  I was going to write that my reasons for liking it have changed since then, but I’m not sure that’s true.  I think it’s more like my understanding of what this represents has changed.  Since symbolism is in the eye of the beholder, and I have changed and am continuing to change, that would be a given.  Still worth saying, though.  We forget too easily that we change. While true, it’s also not what I had planned on my point being when I started writing.

So what was I planning to say?  I was planning on doing a bit of constructive reminiscence, a drunkalog of sorts.  I came across this painting shortly after I returned to drinking after several years dry.  I had been abstinent, but had sought no counseling, no support, no program, no nothing.  When I stopped drinking I simply buried myself in work and study, and used my devotion to those two things as my shield from the world, my own emotions, and any deep relationship with another human being.  Once I was done with college, I was ‘free’ to start drinking again.  My work and school shield gone, I readily took up the liquor shield and kept all those troublesome things at bay.

But I was not happy with it.  Drinking had already nearly killed me in the past, and I worried it would finish the job this time around.  It was painful and it made me sick, and I was ashamed of it.  I couldn’t understand how I could be doing this, but I kept doing it.  Self-medication was too tempting, and I had no idea that I was self-medicating or that I was using the liquor to dysfunctionally deal with… well, me.  I didn’t like myself, so I drank to forget myself, and when it wore off I liked myself even less because I was a ‘useless piece of crap drunk’.  My words to myself, many a time.

So, this painting.  This beautiful bittersweet painting.  I remember finding an image of this while drunk and staring at it.  It brought up some powerful feelings somewhere deep under the stupor, I could feel them moving around in the drowned shell of my mind but could not identify them.  The image was still there, on paper, on my desk when I woke and recovered enough to think straight again.  And then I knew what those feelings it evoked were.

This was a painting of me.  Countless times I had crawled from the house of my drunkeness, of my debauchery, of my uselessness.  Yet there it was.  I couldn’t crawl fast enough or far enough to get away.

It was the center of my world, no matter how much I despised it.  No matter how much I hated it.

No matter how familiar and comfortable it was.  I was doomed to escape from it and doomed to return to it once I escaped.  Over and over, an endless cycle.  My drunkenness would always be the center of my world.

I was mistaken.  My alcoholism will certainly always be at the center of my world.  It must, or I will forget, and from forgetfulness a former addict will proceed to self deception and so back to that familiar farmhouse.

But my drunkenness will not be.  It is not, right now.  As I have read and been told and finally truly learned and claimed for my own, I am recovered.  Not cured, there’s that forgetfulness to guard against.  Those old lies, waiting like worn and comfortable socks to be put back on again.  But I am recovered.

Christina’s World used to symbolize my own doom, that I would never escape the shadow of alcohol, that I would live and die in it.

Now it is a reminder of the darkest days of my drinking life, a reminder of my recovery and the good that has come of it, and a reminder of what friends and family and the fellowship of AA do for me.

Christina was doomed to return not because she lacked determination.  For a woman with crippled legs to get so far from the farmhouse alone and with no mobility aids takes quite a bit of that.

She was doomed because there is nobody in the painting to help her.  I have found that help.

I’m never going back.

People have a kind of secret mantra, or perhaps a select few mantras.  These are things we think about ourselves frequently, what we see in the metaphoric mirror.  What we say about ourselves to ourselves, and what we say about ourselves down deep when we’re not talking about ourselves or thinking about ourselves at all.  We engrave them in ourselves through repetition, whatever their origins in our lives. They can come from all sorts of sources.  Childhood experiences, things said to us by people we know and love, by our teachers and mentors and peers and televisons and magazines and websites, things we learn and interpret and misinterpret, from our own reactions to all of these.  From literally anything in the world.

For me, for a long time, my personal mantra was “I suck”.  I’ve learned that this is not uncommon among people like me: a bit more brains than the average bear.  People with this serious condition** have a way of concluding that if it’s not easy, if excellence does not come instantly, that there’s something wrong.  Probably with it, possibly the situation is just not fair (“this game is fixed!”), but down deep, something is wrong with me.  I have this gift of talent, yet I’m not excelling wildly.  I really failed to understand that no matter what gifts a person has, achievements come through effort.  Or maybe I did, and I resented reality enough to stubbornly deny it.

I must just suck, I thought.

That’s not the only place I got that goofy idea from.  I believe some came from a moderate amount of peer scorn, some of which was invited by me acting arrogantly and dismissively to others.  It was a shield, I think.  We moved from place to place excessively when I was a child, and I learned to keep people at a distance, so it would hurt less when they were gone.  When I was gone.  It was the same thing to me.  Perhaps I got too much early praise and too little constructive criticism.  I’m not sure about that last one, but the people I’ve related my early childhood tell me they think that may be the case.  Whether it is or isn’t, it’s the past and it is what it is, what I have to work with is the now.  That is what I’m responsible for.  But back to my old mantra.

So: I suck.  I’m smart, I’m better than you, and I suck.  My goodness, now that I’ve written it, it’s really gelling in my mind much more solidly than it ever has before.  If I thought I sucked, and I was better than everyone else, then how little did I think of the rest of humanity?

What else explains the height of the pedestal I placed the few people I respected and looked up to?  And how betrayed I felt when I saw human flaws in them?

Although I am writing all this in the past tense, as if it is all completely different now, my view of myself and humanity is not entirely healed yet.  I cannot say with certainty that it will not retain the influence of the first half**** of my life.

Down deep, though, I’m pretty sure that I no longer truly believe that I suck or that you suck.  Recovery has slowly pried those scales from my eyes, and though occasionally they fall back for a little while, I find it easier to notice that they have returned, easier to lift them, and my sight a bit clearer.

You don’t suck.  And that means I don’t suck.  How’s that for an expression of the interconnectedness of all things?

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**hey, everything else is pathologized whether it needs to be or not.  It’s just a matter of time until someone invents Dumbitol to do away with bothersome talents that create social anxiety.

****estimated; I have no certainty of avoiding speeding out of control buses for 39 more years, nor of being lucky enough to have more years of quality life ahead.  Go medical science, I have high hopes of seeing the tricentennial.

Usually I open these things with an amusing or interesting image, not a wall of (someone else’s) text.  This just fit so well, though.

People like to freak out and make a huge deal out of things.  And I say that like ‘people’ means everyone else, but of course I do the same thing.  The other night, I left a 10lb bag of sugar behind at work and got all uptight about it like it was a big deal.  The reality turned out to be that my wife and I were running errands, so we ran them near my work and picked up the sugar I bought last night.  I was uptight, I figured, for several reasons.  I planned to make some grapefruit preserves today… which is a fairly lengthy process that I wasn’t going to start until we got back home anyway.  I was afraid I’d have to buy new sugar.  Well, if so, so what?  Was 5 bucks a matter of life and death?  I’ve had weeks and months where missing out on 5 bucks would have put a moderately large crimp in our household plans.

And yadda, yadda, talk talk talk.  Long story short, I spent an hour or so being grumpy and oversensitive last night over something that, worst case scenario, would have meant that I spent 5 extra bucks to make a couple of gallons of grapefruit preserves.

Like it was a big ol’ deal.  And I know better.  There are a bunch of folks over in Haiti right now who know all about life and death moments.  I’ve been shot at a couple of times, and the main reason the shooters missed was that I did the appropriate thing to make their job of aiming harder.  I’ve pulled out of highway spinouts without killing myself or anyone else a couple of times.  I made an emergency phone call at the end of an extended drinking spree in 1995 that put me in the hospital when I could have just died right there on the couch.  And that’s no bull.  Not only was I so deep in DTs that I couldn’t remember the number for 911**, but by the time they got me there I was suffering from pancreatitis and acute liver failure, and bleeding profusely from an ulcer.

So.  You’d think I’d know what a life and death situation looks like.

Yet I do what that poor schlub who sat rotting for five days in his chair likely did.  Which is treat routine situations as if they were real life and death situations.  Now, to be fair, he may have just had one of those rare strokes or coronaries that hit like a bolt from the blue and *BAM* Emiril style, you’re dead before you know you’re dying.

I kind of hope that’s what happened.  But more likely that guy sat there with some kind of nasty symptom like the so-well-known radiating pain down the left arm.. but dammit, THAT REPORT MUST BE FINISHED.

We do it to ourselves all the time.  Blow minor things out of proportion.  It doesn’t have to be a matter of life and death to be exciting, and it doesn’t have to be a matter of life and death to be important.

Moderation applies to the importance you attach to things, though.  I don’t want to be found dead in a chair because I was doing the most important thing ever… which everyone else found so low-priority that nobody noticed it hadn’t been finished for the last five days.

I also don’t want to be in a position where that unexpected end comes right in the middle of me all a-tizzy over something that’s no big deal.

The real matter of life and death is that I am happy with what I am doing in life, so when death does arrive I can check out with a smile.  Or at the worst, with a shrug and a ‘too bad, I really wanted to see who’s going to host the Tonight Show next****’.

You know, the funniest thing may be that matters of life and death aren’t quite so big either.  I mean, there are 7 billion people on earth.  You may be important, but seriously, come on.  You’re not all that.  And even if you were, dead is dead and the world still turns.  For all of the hooraw people have made of it, we’re still here despite the deaths of Michael Jackson, JFK, emperors, religious figures, kings, children, mothers, fathers, friendships, newspapers (OK, those are still wiggling. barely.), the buggy-whip and whale-oil industries, et cetera ad nauseam.  Every big thing is the end and every end is a big thing.

Death is a big personal thing, but it’s not that big a deal.  It’s just when you go from eating the fruits of the earth to nourishing the fruits of the earth.  Unless you go for the whole formaldehyde and casket thing, in which case there may be a delay of a few hundred or thousand years before you’re any good for growing plants.

And if death is not such a big deal, what the hell was I doing throwing a fit over a 10 lb bag of sugar?  My mind boggles.

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**No joke.  I dialed zero and asked the operator to get me an ambulance to a local hospital.  Thankfully, I got a human operator, and she did.

****Turnover in another 7 months? Only time will tell.

Enlightenment is a dangerous thing.  I’m not talking about epiphany or satori or any other shock-to-the-core-of-your-very-being type thing, I’m talking about having a deeper insight to what is going on in the world and why than your average bear.  Though, now that I think about it, either holds its dangers.

Whether you are sporting a giant IQ under your hat or you happen to have gotten a handle on something important, or if you just know a thing or two about something, it holds the same pitfall.  And that’s that it is a lot easier to think you’re better than someone else if you understand something they don’t.  Even if it’s something they don’t understand because they simply haven’t encountered the opportunity to learn it yet.

I’ve been a fairly big brain for as long as I can remember.  A bright kid, if you could peel me off of the walls and get me to sit still long enought to pay attention to anything.  A geeky kid.  I got my official geek card somewhere around the age of 8, when I would carry a random book from my World Book Encyclopedia set with me if I went anywhere that wasn’t outside to play.

Don’t get me wrong, I went out to play a lot.  The three (I think, it’s been a long time. Could have been 2 or 4) TV channels that we got in rural Wisconsin in the 1970s were not all that enthralling.  I just happened to read a lot, too.

I got it in my head at some point that having some brains and some fancy book learnin’ made me better than the other people around.  I rode that snotty attitude through a lot of broken friendships and into a lot of bourbon bottles and beer cans in my later life.

Sometimes I still think I’m better than you.  Yes, you.  And you too.  All of you.  And all along, somewhere down deep, I knew it was all a big fat load of crap.  I’m a human with experiences.  I know more about some things than you do, and you know more about other things.  I do some things better, you do others.  That’s how it goes.  I knew that.  I really did.

And it didn’t stop me from thinking I was better and why in the hell doesn’t this big unfair world and why don’t all these nasty unfair people recognize that?  It made me genuinely angry when someone did something better than I did or knew something I didn’t.  And I am ashamed to say that many times my immediate response was to try to find fault, and failing that, to cut that person down somehow by displaying or pretending to a ‘greater’ superiority in another field.

I guess what I’m saying is that I had a big ego.  A really big ego.  Bigger than yours, better than yours… oh, damn.  I’m doing it again.

So, back to where I started.  Ego is a trap, and while there is nothing wrong with taking pride in what you do and what you learn, there is something wrong with following that pride into arrogance.  Pride is about giving a genuine 100% effort to what you do, not about who you did it better than.  Real pride is a quiet glow, not a loud bragging.

Arrogance, like alcohol, did something for me.  It just did far less than I thought it was doing, and cost me far more than I thought I was paying.  It wasn’t until I was bereft and broken and ready to surrender that I began to have delusions of adequacy rather than grandeur.

I say delusions, because soon thereafter, I learned that you have to work for adequacy.

So I work.  I’m glad some of that work involves writing and reading.  I’d have hated to give up my encyclopedias.

There is a notion in Western culture that one should be guilty for having certain thoughts.  Not for acting on them, not for dwelling on negative thoughts in an unhealthy and prolonged way, not for planning to act on them, but just for having them.  Although it appears to be directly out of the Christian idea that the thought is as sinful as the action**, it is pervasive enough that the very fact of being raised in the Western world is enough to plant it somewhere in your mind.  As an aside relevant to me and many in recovery of some type who read this, feeling guilty for having negative thoughts is practically a national pastime for us.

The problem with it is that the human mind is constantly throwing stuff out there, and if you’re anything like me, you often have thoughts that you immediately reject because you’d never want to act on them.  For example, if someone aggressively cuts me off in traffic, the idea of ramming their car with mine might briefly flash into my mind.  I feel no urge to stomp on the accelerator and make it so.  My hands do not twitch in the correct direction to maneuver me into position to ram.  It flashes into my brain and it is something I am so opposed to doing that I have rejected it even before I am conscious of the thought.  For me, the negative, angry thought appears exactly simultaneous with the rejection of it.  I don’t go home and think about it beyond that.  I don’t go and beg forgiveness, I don’t feel the urge to seek out the motorist and make amends for my sin.

Because there is none.

Brains are little meaty imagination engines, and they constantly churn out lots of ideas and scenarios.  There is no V-chip in there.  I don’t care for some of the thoughts my personal brain puts forth for me to examine, and so what?

I think this is tied in with the bit of Buddhist wisdom that holds that if you meet the Buddha on the road, you should kill him.

I’m not gonna whip out a gun and plug the jolly fat man if I see him, I don’t think it’s meant to be so literal.  It means put aside your thoughts.

If I meet that mean ol’ guy who cut me off on the road, my first thought is going to be something like, ‘hey, here’s that schmuck who cut me off, what a jerk.’  If I meet the Buddha, my first thought is going to be, ‘hey, this guy is the revered head of a major world religion and philosophy, I should bow down out of respect and do what he says.’

Both reactions are putting the cart before the horse.  Both reactions are that impulse that we are unconsciously taught by our culture that we should feel bad or good about, depending.  We have no right to feel any particular way about them, they are initial impulses, the brainstorming of our… well… brains.  That sounds redundant, but it makes sense, I think.

‘Killing the Buddha’ is putting aside that snap judgment so that we can see what’s really there.  If I don’t put it aside, I might ram that guy’s car after all.  I might obey the Buddha when he tells me to do something that would harm me or another because of unique circumstances, despite his good intentions.

And that really would be a sin.

**Some traditions/sects make more of this than others, so don’t assume what the Christian of your acquaintance thinks of this idea.  You’ll have to ask them if you’d like to know.

For a long time, everything irritated me.  That’s barely an exaggeration; there was almost nothing that didn’t piss me off at least part of the time, and the most innocent things could become an intolerable irritant.

This tendency has been much tempered by my practicing a 12-step recovery program.  Not eliminated, but enormously reduced.  For example, I am now able to live and work with other people without spending half of the time enraged.  I am also now able to live with myself.  Actually, the latter grew from the former.  I think, like many other folks, I am best able to forgive the qualities of others as opposed to myself, but it’s a superficial thing.  I don’t think I’m truly able to forgive something in another unless I am able to forgive it in myself.  That’s the deeper, lasting forgiveness.   But as I near my third anniversary of sobriety, I find that I am even able to forgive that most difficult to forgive person.  Most of the time.  After some sincere soul-searching and procrastination.

Three years ago, I was a ball of rage.  A walking razor blade, cutting without thought.  I had no plans to ever be sober, but was full of endless plans of how I would drink in a controlled way.  This was the first, most difficult to break, deception of self that I faced.  Part of the problem was probably that what I called a comfortable buzz, most normal drinkers would call ’s***faced’.  This is because for whatever reason I have never dealt with alcohol the way most people do.  It’s an AA cliche, and I don’t really care for it because it is often mistaken for being universal, but I drank like an alcoholic from my first drink.  Well, OK, my second.  My first would be a capful of some spirit in a tall glass of grape juice by my father at a party when I was perhaps 9 years old.  My second drink 5 or 6 years later, I had control of the supply and drank until I was loopy, went out to bother some friends, then came back and finished the bottle, and passed out.  Yeah, that’s some alcoholic style drinking right there.

But back to the walking razor blade for a moment.  Pretty much everything and everyone made me angry, and I was set on taking that anger out on anyone and anything that got near.  I never really put that way of dealing with the world together with the alcoholism until I had been 12-stepping for a few months.  The alcohol was a shortcut, a way to make myself feel that this anger was resolved, that I was at peace… for a little while, until the hangover, both physical and emotional, kicked in.

My anger came from resenting the way the world works.  I resented everything from having to go to the store to buy groceries (it takes up my time and money!) to paying bills to working to politics to world affairs.  I could fly into a ranting rage over anything from the difficulty of opening a pouch of shredded cheese to the sociopolitical forces perpetuating poverty in rural Africa.

My anger always had to be witnessed.  Though I was often angry alone, I would have to tell someone about it, in person or online.  Because my anger was a way to show off, to show others how much pain I was in, how sensitive I was.  It was a way to feed my ego.  And it fed off of itself, because I would be very resentful if it was not acknowledged to my satisfaction.

And my ego was very well fed indeed, with all of this anger and showing off.  And ego, in the sense I am talking about it here, is nothing more than a demand that the world conform to my desires and, dammit, DO WHAT I WANT.

Reality is very good, it turns out, at ignoring demands.  And once the world had offended me enough by refusing to acknowledge my angry martyrdom, once the pain of my self-imposed smallness had reached its peak, I found the bottle in my hand once again, and I could not put it down until I had stilled the pain.

Self-flagellation: I couldn’t imagine why it kept hurting.

By which I mean unconsciousness.  Nothing else would do.  When I woke up again, I would have the job of figuring out what I hadn’t done, and what I had done that I shouldn’t have, which would keep me occupied for a while.  Until the anger at the sheer injustice of it all built up again.

This is what is called a vicious circle, and it is as natural and right as any other of nature’s cycles.  It is as simple as cause and effect, and it will keep working just the way it works as long as you would like to ride along.

Learning to identify and deal with resentments and anger in a reasonable way, with respect rather than contempt for the natural chain of cause and effect, was what changed.  In AA, it’s called the 4th step.  In Taoism or Zen, it would be called mindfulness, or seeing what is there instead of what you wish was there.

It all boils down to the same thing: if you consistently deal honestly with yourself and reality, you will understand what happens and ultimately yourself, and once a thing is understood it can be dealt with.

Take a look back at your family.  No, farther.  Farther.  If you’re looking back 2 or 3 million years, you’re thinking of the right territory.  I’m guessing you might have made it back to your great-great grandparents before I said that.  Don’t worry, I’d have been tricked too, if I wasn’t the one writing this.

Way back when, we humans… well, the proto-human species a few branchings back on the evolutionary tree from us… were a pack of losers.  A bunch of wimps.  Mutant weaklings.  The strong, successful (at the time) ones kicked our ancestors out of the safe, familiar trees into the harsh, dangerous grasslands.  Well, now they’re extinct and we’re building mini-malls.  Take that, you bullies!

But our so-far success as a species isn’t my point, nor is schadenfreude at the expense of some million-year-plus extinct burly primates who gave our larger-brained geek progenitors the jungle equivalent of wedgies.

Out on those unwelcoming grasslands, social structure became extremely important.  Without trees to escape into, there was little other than the security of the group to save our plucky distant ancestors from becoming tasty meat snacks for the various predators.  Without the ability to work together effectively, a bunch of naked apes who have exchanged their heavy muscles and thick bones for big brains have no hope of surviving for any length of time, even if they have learned the awesome technology of scraping a point onto a stick by rubbing it on a rock.

Social support remains equally vital today.  Unfortunately, modern society makes it increasingly practical to live without it.  Not only do we have a culture which stresses the importance of the individual above the group, there’s much more.  We have cable and DVDs and videogames to amuse us; many of us don’t even know who our neighbors are, we’re so busy fiddling with them.  Now children play inside alone more often than outside with others, and adults do much the same.  We can order goods online and pick up the packages from our porch with no more extensive interaction than signing our names on an electronic pad.  We can pick up groceries at the big box store and use the self-checkout and never have to talk to a human being in the process.  We can eschew the various social aspects of the internet and read news and comment threads and take advantage of rule 34 without ever betraying our presence to another human being, aside from perhaps leaving a hit counter one point higher.

What rule 34 might look like.

But isolated people still act like connected people.  In other words, they interact with their social group to judge the validity and sense of their own thoughts and actions, building each new idea upon the foundations set by the last good idea validated by the social group.  It’s just that isolated people have made their social group a group of one.  And as anyone acquainted with psychology will tell you, if you’re talking to yourself and you get answers back, you might be in trouble.

In other words, a person in isolation has no compass, so they go winging off in whatever direction sounds like it will feel good to them right at the moment.  Each decision is weighed only from one perspective, and if it is a bad one, there is no chance that it will be gainsaid.  One error in judgment can be endlessly compounded with new bad decisions until you find yourself hopelessly lost, and guess what?

You will have no earthly clue what to do about it.  Because that’s what lost means.

Now, as I have touched upon here, I was hopelessly lost at one point.  I was quite the loner, and boy did it show after a few years.  Even when I was with friends, I hid the important things from them, variously telling myself I was protecting my privacy, sparing them the burden of my troubles, or simply sparing myself from their potential disgust.  I avoided any activity that might bring me closer to them.  I let very few people in, and those couple, only so far.

I often cite two sources for my turnaround: AA and the Tao.  But in reality, it was the same message from each source that enabled me to save myself, and that was that I am in fact part of a greater whole.  It was the restoration to actual participation in social groups that enabled me to figure out where I was, how far off track I had wandered, and how to chart a path back.

In 12-stepping, it’s the 4th step.  In Catholicism, it’s confession.  In therapy, it’s… uh, therapy.  I’d imagine a Buddhist would see it as part of mindfulness.  Of course, we Taoist types have it easy, at least on the surface.  It’s all the Tao.  Unfortunately, that’s too sloppy for just about any purpose one could imagine, so I think I’ll borrow that mindfulness idea and throw in a little 4th step as well.

I’m talking about looking at yourself honestly.  It’s a key component of… well, it seems to be everywhere I look.  It seems to be a key component of success in just about any measure.  A tonic against doing the wrong thing.  When we look at a successful person who went on to fail, it’s usually because they stopped seeing what was there and started seeing what they wanted to.

In short, they fell prey to ego.  Not putting the self first, but assuming that the world must follow the self.  It just doesn’t work that way, no matter how hard we wish to the contrary.  We must exist in the world, we cannot force the world to exist in us.

So, where does the door come in?  The door is our willingness.  Between ego and success, that’s where the door is.  Both ego and success are processes, so this is of course inexact.  Don’t worry, that’s the nature of metaphors, there’s nothing wrong with you if you’re not entirely buying this.  It’s a useful generality, not a roadmap.  You and your willingness are the door between what is causing you trouble, your manifestation of ego, and success, the path you wish to walk.

There’s no doorstop, this is one of these doors you will have to stand beside your whole life, holding it open.  If it slams shut on you, you can go back and open it again, that’s the good news.  But you don’t want it closing if you can help it.  Because the door is indeed alarmed.  It’s difficult and a bit scary to look directly at the door… at ourselves.  And getting right down in what we don’t want to is how we open it.  You can usually tell when you’re doing the right thing in that department when you hear yourself saying “I don’t wanna”.

Metaphors are inexact, and the nature of reality is highly inconvenient.  In a very real way, you are the door, the fear, the relief that comes with looking honestly at yourself, the willingness, the failure and the success.  That’s a lot to wrap one brain around, I think that’s why we have support groups and friends, teachers and authors, in the first place.  To borrow some extra brains from, to wrap these expansive ideas up in a package we can carry with us.  Because words are really useless things, we must find out how to experience what we’re talking about to make it real.

What it boils down to is, is your mind the right shape to be a doorway to the path you want to walk today, or is it a wall blocking your way?  You’ll have to look right at it, and with honesty and mindfulness, to figure it out.  And you are the door, all those things you like and don’t like about yourself and your life together.

And the Door is often alarmed.  When it is, you should open it.  Alarm guards all the best stuff.

Yeah, the title’s not so original.  Luckily, it says what I’m thinking.  The holidays seem to be an intensifier, like dropping the F-bomb in the middle of a normal sentence.  The same old stuff is happening, but somehow it all seems more… immediate.  More likely to grab hold of the ‘ol adrenals and give them a hearty squeeze.  “Gee, gramma, these are some great f***ing socks” sure gets some attention in the worst possible way.  This time of year is like that for me.

I heard someone in an AA meeting call this season “the devil’s triangle”: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s.  S/he** was warning us that the holiday season is much like the Bermuda Triangle for folks in recovery.  Lots of us disappear and never return around now.  Especially the folks in early recovery.  Or the ones who have grown complacent and stopped practicing what they’ve preached because, you know, they’re all fixed now.  It’s part of that horrific failure rate you hear about.  That’s not news to me, though.  I’ve come to understand that folks fail at stuff they’re not serious about all the time, no matter what group, program, or method they practice.  You can fail at driving a nail with a hammer if you screw around, smack it once or twice, then give up and go back to trying to drive it with a butter knife.  It’s not the hammer’s fault, it’s yours.  And yes, that’s blaming the victim, sometimes the victim is actually the rightful owner of it.  Or, more correctly, a portion of it.  Whichever, you get the point.   If you can’t figure out how to drive a nail, call a carpenter and/or your amateur neighbor who shingled his roof last year.  Then do what they tell you to do until you understand enough of it to add your own flourishes.  The basics will remain the same, though, don’t go forgetting.

But, enough of that and back to this season we have going on right now.  I love this season.  I hate this season.  I mean both as much as I could mean anything.  It brings out the best and the worst in people.  I see it in others.  I really see it in others, working in retail.  Unfortunately, I see a little more of the worst than the best, and that means I occasionally have a hard time remembering the good that comes from this time.  I see the best and worst come out in myself this time of year.  I’m a sensitive soul, I see the worst more keenly because I don’t want it to be there.

I remember when I spewed the worst from every pore damn near all the time, when I was an active drunk.  These days it drizzles out from time to time like drainage from an old wound, and it brings back the old memories, and they feel fresh.  As much as I complain about my crappy memory, it’s really pretty darn good.  I can still taste the anger and the hate, the railing at the unfairness of it all, the despair at the knowledge that no fairy princess is coming to drop fortune and success at my feet.

I was a selfish little bastard.  Still am, it’s the response to life I’m learning to change.  The selfishness is like a river, it must be turned an inch at a time.  So I work, and I dig the new channel and build up the banks, and I remind myself often of the principles of the Tao and the principles of AA that I practice and I get off my high-inertia butt and actually practice them.

It’s not any more important right now, just because it’s the western world’s holiday trifecta.  It’s an all the time thing.  But it is more important when the old negative habits and thoughts get stirred up; it’s more important in that particular moment.

There are a lot of those moments this time of year.  Don’t forget who you are.

More importantly, don’t forget who you want to be.

**yes, I know which the person was.  But, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous.