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I watched the Oscars live on Sunday night, and as you may have heard, Will Smith didn’t like one of Chris Rock’s jokes, so he walked on stage and slapped the comedian in the face.
I gotta say, I watch almost every UFC, lots of boxing and I spent my late teens and early 20s in constant fights myself. I have a reasonable threshold for watching violent stuff on TV.
But I still found the Oscars moment to be pretty jarring and unsettling. I mean, it was just shocking, and I couldn’t help but find myself hoping—really, really hoping—that it was a bit, not real.
I have a half-hour’s worth of thoughts but I’ll just give you one: You can’t slap people like that. You just can’t. As someone who does standup on a regular basis, it’s not cool. I’ve seen a lot of genuinely uncomfortable, mean, inappropriate jokes told on stage, and even the drunk people five feet away in the basement of dive bars don’t start swinging on people.
But this is a sober newsletter, and I wanted to call out one thing that spoke to me through that lens, which is what Denzel Washington told Will Smith afterward. I am paraphrasing a bit, but Denzel apparently told him, “At your highest moment, be careful, because that’s when the devil comes for you.”
That statement really hit me because I find it to be so true. I’m going to throw out the devil thing—my definition of devil in this instance isn’t the biblical definition. For me, it’s the idea that we all have that bad voice in our heads that feeds off resentments and character defects and snide comments and tries to talk us into drinking or drugging or bad behaviors. That’s the devil in me.
The general idea of being on guard at your best moments in life really hits home for me. The single most dangerous moments in sobriety for me have been when things are really good. When I have a big problem, I know I need to stay very close to meetings and sober men. When I have little problems, I still know that. Even when things are okay, or pretty good, I seem to not forget that I need to keep the recovery momentum going.
But when things are awesome… I tend to drift. The more money I have, the healthier my home life is, the better my job is—those are dangerous, because you start to think, “I got this. I’ve worked a really good program, I know the 12 steps, I’m using them in my life, I’m killing it. Maybe I can back off a bit.”
When I get pretty full of myself and I throttle down, that is very risky behavior.
I think I’ve been to about 2,500 meetings since I got sober, and I’d say I have probably heard a few hundred people say they’re coming back. Of those people, I have heard quite a few say they had something really bad happen in their life, they started to struggle and they went back out.
But I think about 90 percent have said the opposite—that things were going pretty well and they got too complacent, or they slowed down on meetings, or they didn’t have a sponsor for awhile, and boom, they’re out drinking and drugging again and before they knew it, they were on stage at the Oscars, slapping the s**t out of people.
Okay, maybe no one ever said that last part. But my point is that I want to have the same kind of program, through thick and thin and everything in between. The truth is, when my life gets really good, it’s because of my recovery program. So if I want to keep that momentum going, logically, I need to keep doing what led to it—and that hopefully keeps me from slapping people.
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:
Most Sundays, my wife, kids, and I get together with other AA members for breakfast. At breakfast a few weeks ago, my wife wore a shirt with "Serenity" printed across the front.
One of the kids admired the shirt, read the word out loud, and asked, "What is that--Serenity?"
My AA friend had a quick reply and answered, "We don't know."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 2006, by Jeff W. of Concordia, Kansas)
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