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For the past year or so, I have been very dedicated about getting to the gym. I usually lift weights for an hour, run for 20 minutes, then I go into one of the bathrooms, change clothes and meditate for 5-10 minutes.
I love the meditating part. Meditation is something I only started doing in recovery, and it wasn’t until I was about five years into sobriety. It’s one of those things that is essential to me being sober, versus me being someone who isn’t drinking. There’s a version of my sobriety where I don’t drink any more, but I am pretty miserable and don’t do a bunch of the things like meditation that have been suggested to me as add-ons to my recovery.
These days, I do 20 minutes every single day, and those 5-10 minutes are usually my deepest meditation of the day. I’m usually very sweaty, with my heart still pounding from running, so the cool down period comes at a nice time. Then, with the meditation, it’s a nice, refreshing mental headspace to get into while you still have all that blood rushing through your body. I usually walk out of the gym feeling as serene as I will be all day.
Except, not all days.
The gym has four individual bathrooms—no big locker room. All private bathrooms. All four have showers, a sink, a toilet and a bench to change on. One has a lock that doesn’t work, so I avoid that bathroom. On the day in question, I went into a different bathroom, I peed, washed my hands and sat down on a bench and started to meditate.
I was about four minutes in, and I found myself pretty deep into the meditation when I heard a loud click and a door open. But for another second or two, I stayed in the meditative place that I had gotten to. Then I felt some air and a presence in the room, and I opened my eyes. There stood an old dude, about to whip his junk out and start peeing. He was completely oblivious that I was sitting there on the bench behind the door, two feet away.
Now, it’s important to note here that nobody has ever had any sort of good experience either getting walked in on in the bathroom, or walking in on someone else. It’s incredibly awkward, and I have no idea what either person is supposed to say in that situation other than mumbling a bunch of gibberish.
That’s pretty much what happened here.
I said, “Uh, I’m in here!” which is such a dopey and weird thing to yell. But good luck coming up with something better.
He jumped sideways and backwards and ended up turning slightly toward me. But the surprise quickly turned to boiling hot rage.
“Ahhh, I don’t know what the hell is going around here. None of the bathroom locks work!” he yelled. I remember being a little startled at how fast he went from sheepishness to flat-out anger.
I just kind of smiled and muttered, “Yeah, I know,” and the guy turned to leave. But he didn’t leave. He wanted to go off on the gym, and he started to.
“I pay $60 a month to have bathrooms with locks that don’t work? What kind of gym can’t figure out locks for their bathrooms?”
In that moment, I feel a little peace coming over me.
I said to him, “Actually, I’m not sure what happened, but I didn’t lock the door. I should have. Sorry about that. That’s on me.”
He still wasn’t done, though. It’s like he didn’t even hear me, or he didn’t want to hear me. He kept blasting off about the gym, and I just stared at him and didn’t say anything. He eventually turned and walked out the door, I locked it, and I went back to meditating.
I titled this blog post about how this is an indicator that sobriety is working for me, and that may seem goofy based on the subject matter. But I walked out of the gym laughing about four things.
One is that sobriety has helped me develop healthy life patterns such as going to the gym, and meditating every single day. I’m grateful for that.
Secondly, I never thought I’d be someone who would meditate at all, let alone consistently. So I am grateful for that, too.
Thirdly, I have recently decided to push back hard against my urge to criticize, make fun of, s**t-talk and gossip, and that dude teed me up with an opportunity to take a dumb thing that would be easy to complain about. It might have been fun to start barking along side that dude about the morons at the gym. But I get almost nothing out of that other than a little bit of instant gratification… that usually turns into remorse a little later. I have put my hand up at meetings and owned that character defect, and I have shared it with people in my recovery network hoping that the added accountability might benefit me. It did in this circumstance.
Last but not least, I’m still a little surprised—happily surprised—at how much my mind has shifted in sobriety during moments when it would be easy to yell at someone. This dude came barging into the bathroom and started to whizz while I am sitting right there, then he didn’t apologize right away. No courtesy knock. No gentle opening of the door and saying, “Hello? Anybody in here?” He just cruised on in and went off about the gym when he discovered somebody was in there. And even in that split-second of awkwardness, I was able to quickly process the idea that I played a significant part in the whole mishap. If I had locked the door, none of it would have happened. It’s pretty much on me, and as tempting as it might have been to yell, “Yo, geezer, get the f— out of here!”, I was actually able to say right away, “You know what? I should have locked the door.”
So there you have it. Sobriety, discovered on a bench in a gym bathroom. Bet you didn’t think you’d hear somebody say that today, did you?
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
Now that I’ve been sober for awhile, I've discovered three things:
* My wild oats have turned into 100% bran.
* I finally got my head together and my body fell apart.
* It's easier to get older than it is to get wiser.
(CREDIT: AA Grapevine, November 2005, by Richard M. of Golden, Colorado)
Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.
