I'm not a doctor, but I play one in my life

The subject of today's meeting was Step Two. Two is key for me, because my Step One was very sincere, a very low bottom. I was disgusted by my behavior and I couldn't stop. Desperate. Step Three was fairly easy for me, because I've always been one to jump on the bandwagon. Very willing. Recovery has been a very good thing to commit to.

Step Two is hard, harder for me. I like to entertain the notion that I'm special, especially damned and beyond hope. I'm really not all that hard a case, but I feel incurable. I think this arises from my experience of not being able to fix myself. I can be so hard-headed that I think "If I can't fix it, no one can".

I'm such an expert. I am also an expert on most other people.

Step Two tells me that there is something out there that can make me whole. It also tells me that that power is not me. From this, I understand that the best thing I can do is get out of the way. The doctor (God) wants to work on me, but I need to get out of the way first.

That is really, really hard for me. For some reason, I am always searching, always reaching. I think my mind is completely devoted to being a problem-solver. There is no bigger problem than me. How is that for grandiosity?

Thinking about it more as I drove from the meeting, there is only one Step where I fix anything, and that is Step 9. I fix -- or at least try to fix -- the messes I have made along the way. And even that is a humble task, because I do not really fix the issue, I do my best to mend the issue. I treat the problems of the past, I do not ultimately correct them.

But the other Steps, the other actions of recovery, none of them are about me fixing anything. None. It is just not part of the program. What is a part? Accepting. Accepting. Always, always I want things to be different. I guess I am afraid that if I accept things, things will not change. That is my fear. That is the little "truth" that keeps me in a state of personal meddling.

God, I am afraid of letting go. I am afraid that I am not going to be taken care of. I am afraid that letting go means giving up. I am a fighter. I am a fighter. Man, am I beat up.

So, I have a lot to learn. Luckily, I do not have to go anywhere to, catch anything, hold anything to learn it. I just need to be here now. I need to let go.

Please God, you are welcome to my sorrow, you know how to sooth it.
You are welcome to my pain, you know how to treat it gently,
God, you are welcome to mistakes, you know which step lead me astray,
You are welcome to my plans, you know better than I.

May I accept what is happening now
May I move forward with simplicity
May I look backward with equanimity
May I be grateful for all that happens

Invested in life

I had coffee yesterday with a friend in recovery. He told me that he had a difficult conversation with his partner on Sunday, but that on Monday he felt better and has been feeling good all week. I think that's a parable of recovery.

Recovery involves courage and hard work today. It's not something to put off for tomorrow. Courage is nothing more than doing the thing that your fear tells you not to do. Every Step of recovery is an assault on your fear. And every assault on your fear is a step in recovery, no matter if it involves making amends to your wife or merely thanking God for another day of life.

The upside is that I think my life today is the product of what I did yesterday. My recovery work puts a deposit in my bank that I enjoy tomorrow. Much of the benefit of recovery is seen down the road. When you're in the mindset of tomorrow, you start to listen more to God, because when you're invested, you want to make sure your effort goes towards something of real value.

Unfortunately, I'm not set up to think and act like that. I'm an addict and my addiction is all about feeling good RIGHT NOW. My life in addiction was a string of "live for the moment" days that really didn't add up to much. And each day I'd wake a little less happy with myself and a little more sure that I didn't have what it took to get better.

Whatever good things might come into my life would be quickly consumed. I was always living just on what was available right at that moment. Worse, I "sold off" whatever credit I had in good will with everyone I knew: burning my furniture for heat until I didn't have a chair to sit on.

Things have taken a different turn in recovery.

I woke up this morning feeling okay about being me. I didn't feel that way because I'm suddenly a good person now. I feel that way because I've slowly become a good person.

The theme for this week for me is giving up the obsession with things being "right" right now.

I didn't wake up wanting to be someone else. I didn't have regrets about yesterday, or any yesterday back and back and back. I'm reconciled with life. There was a lot of work to get where I am and there's still work today. The task was and is a lot lighter because of the people in recovery who came before me and those who have directly guided me with their example and words.

My life is precious now, because I'm invested in it. I thank God that I was able to learn how to live through 12-step recovery.

Gradual or lightning-bolt awakening?

I was discussing progressive versus immediate spiritual awakening with a friend in recovery the other day. Apparently it's also an issue of enlightenment in Buddhism.

Can a person evolve into a different way of being and living? Or does everything happen all at once?

Bill W. is the classic lightning-bolt recipient. He had a light-in-the-sky experience and from that point on was in communion with his Higher Power and was able to build his life around God's will without reservation.

"Without reservation." Actually, I don't know if that is true of Bill W. That's probably my projection of what I would be like if I were to have an inexplicably strong feeling of the presence of God.

I have not had that experience. I feel I am progressing gradually in my relationship with my Higher Power. There's still the need for a lot of faith.

The question is, am I am really building, or am I just spinning my wheels? Is there some cosmic scale being tipped slowly by each spiritual action, so that eventually I will be in communion with God? Should I be waiting? Or should I be working?

Of course, Bill himself -- despite having been a lightning-bolt recipient -- believed in gradual spiritual awakening. The 12 Steps as a metaphor is an inclined plane. It assumes that one step takes you higher than the next and so on. Having worked all twelve steps, however, I can say that my spiritual awakening is still pretty groggy. There is a lot about my day-to-day actions that are not in concert with a Higher Power who is outside of me.

I am on a spiritual quest. I act when I believe I should act. I let go when I believe I should let go. Why am I not feeling better?

The terrible spiritual truth I'm dealing with today is that my expectation of feeling better may be the primary obstacle to my further spiritual growth. "It's a selfish program", I have heard. We get in this to get better. And I have gotten a lot better. But I haven't found peace or serenity or whatever it is I hope to get out of the program, out of a spiritual life.

Perhaps my expectations of serenity are premature. I think there may be a lot more pain I need to pains-take before I feel consistent serenity. Perhaps I will not reach a spiritual serenity until I discard the hope that I will attain serenity. Wouldn't that be just like me?

But back to the subject, I think the difference between progressive or immediate awakening is merely one of perspective. Bill W. didn't know he was close to a dramatic spiritual awakening the day before it happened. It just happened. He did his spiritual work and then it happened.

Think of a bowl on a kitchen table. A child pushes it inch by inch towards the edge. Eventually there is one push that sends it over. I am a blind bowl. I don't know if I'm a millimeter from the edge or a foot. But I can still push. And when enough of me is over the edge, the rest of me will fall off the table.

Unfortunately, I don't know if my pushes are pushing me towards the edge, or away from the edge. Yikes! That's the conundrum of effort. I also don't know if the table is slanted away from the edge. My one-inch push may be immediately followed by a two-inch backslide.

Perhaps I should just wait for the Child.

Why does God need me to do anything?

Most of the time we spend trying to understand the nature of God -- the way that God works -- is wasted time, at least in my opinion. I shouldn't say that. I should say that it is of very little use to me or to God for me to spend time trying to figure out God. It may be entirely valid for other people with greater knowledge and understanding to contemplate the nature of God. It's just not for me.

I have simpler needs and simpler goals.

The substance of my recovery is my decision to follow God's will and the actions that result from that decision. God has something that He wants me to do; some bit of work cut out for me each day. Through prayer, meditation and moment-to-moment mindfulness, I can get a sense of what that work is, and then I can go about doing it.

This is what helps me to grow. This is what keeps me healthy. All of my progress in recovery has come out of doing God's will. I didn't always understand it that way, but that's what it was and is.

Sometimes the assignment is pretty simple: don't act out, go to a meeting, call that person back. I don't have to know how my actions fit in to any grand scheme. I can just do my part. The great debilitating question of my life has always been "what should I do next?" Following God's will -- the simple things -- has meant more to me than all the exquisite reasoning that I've created, mulled over and discarded over the years.

But still there is a nagging question. I've struggled with this question since first working Step Three:

Why does God need me to do anything?

God is all-powerful, right? He can just make it so. Why does God need little old me? Part of my asking the question, I suppose is just my laziness. Maybe I'd rather not work and am griping about God asking me to do things. "Why did you call me over here if you could have done it yourself?" But setting aside my sloth, it's a fair question: why does God need me?

Is doing God's will just a make-work project? Some sort of celestial work-fare program? I hope not. Although my hopes don't amount to much in the grand scheme of things.

Thursday night I had a realization that helps me to answer this big question.

I'm not a theologian, and I apologize to any who might by some unfortunate accident stumble across this post. And again, I intentionally try not to ruminate on the nature of God, Man or myself too much. I do this because I have an aversion to religion, which is very concerned with defining God. I can't afford to dislike my own theology, so I have little.

The realization on Thursday is, "God needs my help because addicts don't listen to God."

The foundation of 12-Step recovery is addicts helping other addicts. Addicts tune out any right-minded person who wants to help them out.
The self-centered, long-suffering addict has been lectured to enough, thank you. But addicts will listen to this story "My life was miserable, completely out of control and then I found help through a program of recovery." That is the foundation story of AA and its subsequent spin-offs.

God is talking to us all the time. The pain in my back is a message from God. So is a symphony, the price of a loaf of bread and the misery of my addiction. The clearest messages, the ones that say I should mend my ways and seek help for my worst deficiencies are many. But I ignored them. I discounted them. I resented them. God was speaking to me, and I ignored Him. I even cursed Him.

And then I started to attend meetings. My meetings weren't filled with wise, well-reasoned men and women, they were filled with addicts, young and old, happy and sad. These people spoke the words of God to me through their stories. I listened and learned and eventually made progress in living a life of recovery rather than misery.

And that's the key. We're all a bunch of knuckleheads. God can't get through to us. God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, does not force the solution on addicts or any other person. I think that's why religion or faith alone can't help us out of our mess. We need each other and the message of the program.

So, that is why God needs us. Through our spiritual practice and our service work, we carry the message to another addict. If we do not do this, the message will not get through.

This realization calls to me. It urges me to stay sober and help others. There is so much pain out there and I can help. I and others like me who have made that decision to help are the only ones who can. That is inspiring and it makes my life and my work seem valuable, even holy.

"Now matter how far down the scale you have gone, you will see how your experience can benefit others." That's a promise.

Your higher power is who you think is in charge

Being a practical addict is sometimes an uphill battle. I want things to make sense. When things don't make sense, I want to reject them. One big obstacle is the concept of a higher power. I've developed a working relationship with my higher power in a practical way that works for me.

It's a slow process and it comes down to this: what am I willing to believe today? I have not had a great thunder-strike realization about God. I'm trying not to stand in the way of that happening, but I'm also not waiting around for it. I can't afford to wait around for me to completely accept a concept of a higher power. I could die before then, or at least live miserably before then. I don't think that's my higher power's will for me. So I need to find a concept of a higher power that I'm willing to believe in today.

I've made a lot of progress in accepting the reality of a higher power in my life. I'm not going to get into the particulars on this post, or maybe any post. I realized last night in a meeting that I keep my concept of a higher power pretty sketchy. I think that's practical for me, because I have a tendency to tear down the things I construct. Negative skepticism. My experience so far and my expected experience for the rest of my life is that God will be revealed to me only partially. I need to keep my attention on the fraction of my imagination that has faith rather than the fraction that lacks faith. It's hazy now and will forever be a little hazy. So, I need to be at peace with the haze, with the doubt.

But back to the point at hand, my first toehold into having any faith in a higher power is this: my higher power is whoever or whatever I believe is really in charge. It's a simple question: What is the ultimate authority in my life?

The practical aspect of this for me is that I can start my faith in a higher power without having to believe in anything supernatural. Even a complete atheist -- which I'm not -- has a concept of the ultimate authority. No one believes there are no rules. You can deny Noah's flood, but you can't deny gravity or death or the sweetness of a lollipop.

When I reflect deeply on what or who is really in charge, it exposes the fact that I have been living my life under the control of some false gods. The primary false god is me. I have found anxious refuge many times in the belief that I am the ultimate authority. I say anxious, because being my own higher power is a miserable experience. I am a jealous god and my subjects are very uncooperative.

The other ultimate authority has been my parents, or more broadly "other people." I seem to have this chorus of clucking Presbyterians continually holding judgment over my thoughts and actions. This higher power, while moral, consistent and fairly accessible, has not been particularly humane, at least not towards my native inclination to fail to take faith at face value.

My relationship to a higher power has developed through reviewing my preconceived notions of ultimate authority. I take up the idea, reflect on it and accept what I can believe and discard what I can't. This initially doesn't leave me with a lot to believe in. But for me -- and this is very important -- I don't get a lot of spiritual traction by giving lip service to something I don't believe in. So, rather, I have pared down my faith to just that little bit I can believe in.

From that little beginning I can build a faith that is appropriate to me. I don't have to fit myself to another's faith, no matter how exquisite. That didn't work for me as a child and it doesn't work for me now.

So, it's about making faith work for me. I'm a very imperfect vessel, and today I humbly admit that I have an imperfect solution. It's a slow process, but it grows and builds within me and without me in a natural way.

Personal inertia works for recovery as well as addiction

My outlook, my habits, my way of life developed over many years. This did not happen over night. In the case of my addiction, years of selfish and destructive behavior. That is the way I lived. And living like that, that's how I expected to live. The habits became ingrained.

Habitual behavior establishes personal inertia. The definition of inertia is the tendency of a body to maintain its state of rest or uniform motion unless acted upon by an external force. We usually understand inertia as staying still, but in physics, it means that something in motion will stay in motion. This is true in space more than here on earth, so it takes a thought experiment to understand it. If you were driving your car in space (where there's no gravity or friction) and you took your hands off the wheel and foot off the accelerator, you would continue to go in the same direction forever at the same speed. You'd travel on and on because of inertia until some other force intervened.

So, as an addict, I built up a personal inertia to keep doing addictive things. There was a momentum that continually suggested options that would reinforce my addictive behaviors. The cycle. There were other forces working against the addiction, of course: my wife's feelings, my basic need to make money, my shrinking self-respect, etc. But these forces were weaker than the personal inertia of my addiction.

So then I hit bottom, right? Unfortunately, everything didn't stop for me when I hit bottom. My personal inertia kept me going, and keeps a lot of addicts going. Maybe we don't feel the same way about our addictive behaviors, but we keep doing them. We've taken our foot off the accelerator, as it were, but the car keeps moving.

So, how do we get moving in the right direction? The first way is to take our foot off the accelerator. Gratefully, there is a lot of anti-addict friction in our universe. But the brakes will only stop us, they won't get us going in the right direction.

What can get us going in the right direction is recovery work, of course. Recovery work can turn us around.

The problem is, you start your recovery work while you still have a lot of addiction momentum. And it takes a long, long time to turn it around. It takes an enormous amount of effort to reverse our trajectory. One dilemma is we tend not to notice how much our little effort is working against our large inertia. It does not seem to make much of a difference. I'm personally sure, though, that it does make a difference. Every little bit helps, so it's important to do recovery work every day. It adds up.

Amazingly, it's also been my experience that when I do my small part, my higher power will do the rest. There is a multiplier effect to working in the direction of God's will for me. I am truly powerless over my addiction, the inertia is too great, but with God's help I can get better. God's will for me, as best as I can understand it, is for me to be healthy, happy and free for my own sake and so that I can be of service to God.

Thankfully, recovery work started working for me long before I recognized the connection to God's will. The same can be true for anyone, no matter their belief or lack thereof.

The upside of this is if you get going in the right direction -- building momentum towards living in harmony with God's will --you will have positive personal inertia that will make it easier and easier to make the right choices and live free, happy and healthy. What a blessing it is to know this after years of despair. What a blessing it is to share this.