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One of the most beautiful—ALLEGEDLY—things about recovery is that being sober helps you stay present. To not live in shame from the things we’ve done in the past. And to not live in the wreckage of your future.
Except… sometimes the present sucks. I had a week-long stretch earlier this month where I felt like crap. Nothing significant had happened. I just felt irritable, restless and discontent.
I did all the things we’re supposed to do: Slow down, pray, meditate, make calls, get to meetings, blah blah blah. It didn’t help right away. And that’s what a good addict like me wants—pain should go away immediately, and pleasure should stay here forever.
But I did all of those things, and then I kept doing them, over and over again. I’ve had this happen before, where you just have to grind away at the rut you’re in.
Then I had a funny little aha moment on an airplane. I was traveling for business, and as I drove to the airport, I couldn’t believe how foggy it was. It was one of those grey December days where you put on your big winter coat and go outside and it’s raining but somehow 61 degrees right before Christmas. That made for some very thick fog as I slowly drove to the airport.
I got on the plane and sat down and looked out the window—I could barely see the wings, that’s how foggy it was. As we started to pull out from the gate, the pilot got on and said all the normal stuff about how long we’ll be in the air, the height we’ll be traveling (by the way, does anybody care about the height? Unless you’re alerting me that we’re flying 20 feet above the ground so watch out for treehouses and swing sets, just get the plane in the air, bro).
Then he mentioned the fog and he said he was going to take the plane straight up above the fog and cloud cover. And wow, he did. When the plane took off, I thought maybe he said screw it, let’s go to the moon. We zipped really high, really fast, and I think within a minute we were up above the cloud cover.
And… it was quite nice up there. Sunny. No fog. I stared out the window for a minute and had a mini epiphany about my own life. Here we were, still in the central Connecticut area we had just been in, only 10,000 feet above now, with a wider view of the present. And when you look down on things from that vantage point, it looks pretty sunny.
You can probably see where this is headed. I spent a few moments smiling and thinking about how stuck in the fog of everyday life I had been, and how at 10,000 feet, things were pretty damn good.
I’m healthy. My wife is healthy. My kids are healthy. My cats are healthy… pretty chunky, but healthy. I paid every single bill of mine this month, and I had enough left over to buy holiday gifts for my family.
I can keep going but you get the point: The truth of my life isn’t the fog, it’s the 10,000 foot view. And the 10,000 foot view is pretty damn great… although, even from up there, I can see the barrel asses on my cats!
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
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:
My neighbor knows I've had problems with alcohol in the past. Recently, I met her in the hall as I was leaving and I told her I was going to an AA meeting.
"What?!?!" she asked. "I thought you quit drinking!"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, August 2006, Joe H from Sterling, Colorado)
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