If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!
I saw a segment on 60 Minutes this past weekend about some of the new revelations that astronomers are making about the origins of our universe. To summarize as best I can… holy freaking s**t.
They’re making amazing discoveries every single day about the vastness of our galaxy, and the many, many other galaxies out there. One number that made my head explode a bit was one astronomer saying that we understand about 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is a total mystery. He used the terms dark energy and dark matter in a way that made me just shake my head at the unknown nature of our universe, our galaxy, our world, our country, our state, my house… everything.
I love stuff like that because it really helps me in my own life.
There are two ways you can go on something like this. The first is feeling meaningless. I know I have had phases where I feel panic about being just a tiny, little speck in the grand scheme of things. It can be very haunting to know that the world has existed for millions of years and will exist for millions of years after I am worm food, and that that world is just a tiny dot in the grand scheme of the universe. It all seems so vast, and it can be pretty easy to suddenly wonder, “What does all of this even matter?”
I choose to think of it differently, though. I choose to concentrate on how freeing it can be. One of the biggest things I wrestle with every day is not having a firm higher power. I have had long stretches of sobriety, including right now, where my higher power isn’t a clear religious figure or specific philosophy of any kind. I can’t even really describe it in words. It’s an amorphous, cobbled-together blob of trusting the universe and slogans.
What goes up, must come down.
Do the next right thing.
You’re responsible for the effort, not the outcome.
Faith without works is dead.
I don’t know. Some s**t like that. Whatever it is, it has been working for me, and the idea that the universe is bigger than even what we currently define as the universe can be a very humbling feeling. I wrestle every day with having moments where I try to bend the outcome of my life toward what I want. Without even trying, I become my own higher power, making stuff happen, pushing people to agree with me, wearing down people who disagree, all because I am trying to be powerful, not powerless.
As much as I love the phrase you hear at meetings all the time that “I’m just a bozo on the bus”… how often do I really mean that? How often do I truly accept that I should do the best I can but that I should be content with being a worker among workers, a sober person among sober people, a husband among husbands, and so on? Not very often.
So that’s why something like the 60 Minutes piece can be so helpful. It was awesome and awe-inspiring. There were so many pictures showing human beings looking as far as possible over and over again, and just discovering they had barely discovered anything at all. I loved the uncertainty that these scientists fessed up to. I am so much better off waking up every day with the idea in my head that I have no idea about most things in life, than the alternative.
So thanks, astronomers for blowing my mind in the best possible way!
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....
"A lot of times I blacked out. The rest I don't remember."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, March 2005, by Andy of Pearland, Texas)
Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.
