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One thing I wanted to mention because I haven’t in awhile… Nelson H. isn’t my real name. It’s a pen name that I use for this newsletter. And I sometimes change some details to protect others’ identities, and sometimes I combine people or anecdotes to make a larger point. I think the larger points within this newsletter are always true and based on real events and situations. But if you and a gang of fact-checkers examined this newsletter, you would find that sometimes I will say something happened years ago but it was actually more recent than that. However, like recovery is sometimes described, the exact nature is often more important than the exact details.
Right before Thanksgiving, I was walking out of a meeting with a guy who said he always tries to remember around the holidays that, “A grateful heart never drinks.” I love that phrase now. But I didn’t always love it.
You hear that quote a lot in 12-step meetings and from sober people, and I used to shrug my shoulders at it. I don’t think I’d ever spent any time truly contemplating the relationship between gratitude and not drinking. And to be honest, early on in recovery, I bristled at anything that seemed like hippy-dippy b******t. I was too cool for that, ya know? What a mistake by me.
In recent years, I did quite a few gratitude lists and I began to realize that gratitude is a room clearer. By that, I mean that if you bring gratitude into the room, everything else clears out. I would make this list at the end of every day with 5-10 things I was grateful for, and the reality of my life would sink in. I was healthy. My wife and kids were healthy. We’d paid all our bills, so the cars were running and the lights were on. I had a job—a job I really love, too. My cats were great. Dinner was very good. My neighbors were awesome.
Anyway, you probably get the point that when you zero in on all the good things, it really pulls life back to a treetop view. The non-treetop view can be petty and dopey and lots of little tacky-tacky annoyances and resentments that feel like a big deal but aren’t.
So I would try to get a grateful heart, and it often worked. To go back to my thoughts on the phrase “A grateful heart never drinks,” it was true in that instance. But what also was true was, a grateful heart didn’t have space to be mad about that work email, or s**t-talk another parent from the playground, or mock somebody at Target, or yell at a driver who cut the line in a traffic jam. There wasn’t room for bad habits when my whole head and heart were filled with gratitude.
It’s interesting how much of an antidote gratitude can be for anger. For the sake of this conversation, let me define anger as a complex emotion that includes resentment, fear, ego and a bunch of other things. I’m almost never angry just because I’m mad. There’s usually something else going on. For example, take a situation where I am angry at somebody for, say, not including me on a work email. It’s not nearly as simple as not being included on a work email.
It’s me wondering a bunch of things that all collide and turn into fear and ego and eventually anger:
Did they purposely exclude me?
If they accidentally forgot me… how is that possible? I should have been the first person they thought of!
Is there a work group that is getting close and I am not involved?
Should I reach out and give them a hard time about it?
Maybe I should not invite that person to the next work meeting?
I could keep going, but you get the point. Humility drains out. Conspiracy and fear enter the chat. Patience and grace are nowhere to be found. At the end, it’s just that I am pissed.
Let me go back to that antidote idea. Sometimes when I am in one of those ruts where I got left off an email or something else that is petty in the grand scheme of things, I will run through a gratitude list, and the amount of gratitude quickly pushes all the other crap out of the room. By the end, I’m no longer livid that I was forgotten, and I don’t feel the need to write—and rewrite—a scathing reminder that I BELONG IN IMPORTANT WORK MEETINGS, A*****E.
Instead, I’m just sitting there thinking about how I have a good life, good family, good house, and on and on. And that is a better place to be than plotting out scathing reminders.
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:
HEARD AT MEETINGS
“When you make a mistake, make amends immediately. It’s easier to eat crow while it’s still warm.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, June 2001, Susan C. from Richmond, Virginia)
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