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I took my family to Disney this year, and my youngest daughter really wanted a giant beach ball as a souvenir. She saw some kids who had bought one at the hotel gift shop and then had been playing with it in the pool.
She wanted to do that, too, but I talked her out of it and got her to buy something else. My logic was that I didn’t want to have to lug a giant beach ball home.
I told my wife about it later, and she laughed and said, “You know you can deflate a beach ball into a small chunk of rubber that fits easily into a piece of luggage, right?”
The answer is… yeah, I guess I knew that but it didn’t quite dawn on me when I was haggling with my daughter.
I bring this up because I have been thinking a lot lately about a theory I have about my sobriety, which I call the Backpack Theory. Let me explain the Backpack Theory.
I think about my life as though I put on a backpack every morning and I wear it around all day, at all times. When the backpack is empty, I start to forget I even have a backpack on.
But that’s not usually how it works. I start to collect things throughout the day—frustrations, stuff that I need to do but I am procrastinating about, fears about work projects, insecurity about money, a headache or other physical pain, a difficult conversation I have to have with one of my kids, and on and on.
I start collecting those things within five seconds of waking up. I start packing them into the backpack and then I strap it on and start trying to move around that day. The backpack is obviously a metaphorical backpack—I promise you, I am not in the kitchen getting my coffee for the morning in underwear and a backpack. But you get what I mean.
There’s two ways I move through life with my backpack on, accumulating grudges and irritations and gossip and s**t-talk and self-pity.
I either pack it all in the backpack all day until I feel like I can’t take another step because it’s gotten so heavy and burdensome. When I do that, I find myself very unbalanced and out of whack, and it is not good.
Or—to go back to the beach ball story—I deflate the thing and stuff it into the bottom of the backpack and it doesn’t weigh me down and throw me off balance.
The better way is obvious, isn’t it? But I choose option No. 1 sometimes, because sometimes I still like to have the weight of the world on me, even though it’s b******t. There’s something exciting and definitely NOT boring about having a big bag of stuff that sets you on fire inside.
But it’s not very sustainable. I can’t have many days like that. Actually, I can’t have many afternoons or three-hour stretches like that. I need to deflate that stuff right away.
So the next obvious question is, how do you deflate those things?
The single biggest thing I do sometimes is a mini fourth step. I will take something that is bothering me, write down what it is, what it affects (that’s pride, ego, insecurity, etc.) and then try to figure out my role in it. Sometimes that takes 15 seconds—it can be on the back of a napkin or in my Notes app on my phone. It doesn’t have to be a six-hour meditation on that clown who lives up the street. It can be a 60-second meditation on the clown that lives up the street!
Sometimes I don’t even formally write down a fourth step. I had one recently where I called three sober friends over the course of about a day and a half, and I aired out the situation. We talked through what my role was, and I ultimately processed it and deflated that beach ball. One less thing for the backpack.
I also noticed recently that sometimes a mini fourth step doesn’t completely wipe out the thing bothering me. It does, however, usually suck a huge percentage of anger out of the issue. And if I can have a difficult situation in my life where my head is in an 80 percent better place, that’s a big victory and I will take it. Living a life 100 percent free of anything bothersome is something I haven’t seen happen for myself, so hanging onto that idea is pretty delusional at this point.
So I guess the bottom line I want to ask myself every day is, how much do I want to put in that backpack today? Do I want it stuffed to the point where I am about to tumble over backwards? Or do I want to have a light backpack that I barely notice? It’s often my choice.
Oh, and one other bottom line: We’re talking about hitting Disney again next year for vacation, and I think I owe my daughter a beach ball. An UNINFLATED beach ball.
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
After a recent meeting, one man was sharing with another the news of his recent job promotion. "I've got a big pair of shoes to fill," he said.
The other replied, "The job will probably work out better if you just wear your own shoes."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2008, by Tim G. of Seattle, Washington)
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