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I heard a great speaker at a meeting once who talked about being right. About how we all want to be right. That when we’re right, we feel smart. We feel valuable. We feel like we have intuition, that we should be consulted on things in the future because we nailed this one thing.
But… what does it even mean to be right? I’ll use the workplace as an example. Almost every worker on earth has a list of 10 things that their company does that are dumb and that we would change if we were in charge. I would say I have definitely had moments like that. Then I moved up a little bit in management and realized the other factors that went into certain decisions because now I was in that spot. That was a real ah-ha moment.
I’ll give you another example. I was in a fairly heated debate with my wife once about when we needed to leave to get somewhere. She said it took a little less than 20 minutes and the appointment was at 3 pm, so we should leave around 2:40. I said I thought that was cutting it close, and that we should aim for 2:30 because you never know if you hit road construction or traffic. We ended up leaving around 2:40 and there was indeed a lane closure. My wife was cursing the roadwork crew as we sat and waited, and sure enough, we were five minutes late. I made sure to remind my wife that we would have been fine if we’d left when I suggested. She freaking loved that, let me tell you.
I was right… and I won absolutely nothing. We were still late. By trying to dunk on her, my wife was aggravated, which is exactly what would have happened if the roles were reversed. So it brings up the concept that even when you’re right… who gives a s**t? Did it matter?
That made me think of a great line from the Tenth Step in the 12 and 12 book, where it says we were often “emotionally ill and frequently wrong.” Even in sobriety, and even on great days in sobriety, I am often a little off emotionally, which leads me to offer unnecessary or bad input, to argue more than I should, and other bad behaviors.
And yes, that means I am frequently wrong, too. I will go back to a point I raised earlier about playing the long game in recovery. Sometimes I look back on things in life where I was right six months earlier, and I realize that I may have been right, but it didn’t matter. Or I may have been right and it mattered… but not nearly as much I was haggling about. Or that I was right in the moment but over the long haul, maybe I wasn’t right. So right and wrong can be much more complicated than it would seen.
That line really cracks me up: emotionally ill and frequently wrong. I catch myself on a regular basis being one or the other of those things and it never turns out well. And when I am both emotionally ill and frequently wrong? Holy s**t, look out.
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....
"The good news is that we get our emotions back. The bad news is the same."
(Credit: Grapevine, by Jack L. of Hewlett, NY, August 2005)
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