Privilege

I still wake up in the mornings full of fear though it was much worse in my drinking days.  Usually about 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., after the few hours of sleep that followed a long rowdy day of drinking, I would revive into consciousness and be plagued by intense, nameless, objectless terrors.  The worst of these phantom horrors have passed since I stopped drinking, but still morning fears plague me.  Te best remedy against the fog is to leap out of bed, wash up, eat, and get to the work and play of the day.

This morning I woke up with the fears, but also with an extraordinary sense of the privilege of being alive.  How extraordinary that I am alive!  I could very well be dead given my careless drunken idiocy.  Yet here I am and each moment a great gift.  Whether drinking or sober in the past the idea of the great beauty of life eluded me completely.  I was always too preoccupied with very negative thinking, pessimism, the wish for death, a sense of doom, clawing anxiety, paralyzing irritability, crushing shame and energy sapping guilt.  All of which was in part what led me to the numbing effect of drink.   Today these plagues have largely passed.  Or at least this morning, through the cloud of fear, the sense of this wild privilege of the adventure of life made me leap out of bed.  Today offers a cornucopia of new and familiar sensations: a cup of steaming coffee, weather and light of all kinds, rattling sounds of the workmen drilling through concrete, handshakes and embraces, squeezing the Charmin, scrubbing my scalp, revving up the car engine and feeling the heat blast out the little vents onto my cold hands, even the daring thrill of making spelling mistakes while writing!  Oh yes the privilege of life!  How can I stand it all, so precious and acute and abundant!

What a Horror

I hated my first meeting with other alcoholics.  It was in a large damp church basement which was full of fold-out metal chairs.  Fluorescent lights hung above dozens of long cafeteria style tables.  A crowd of about 70 people, both alcoholics and non-alcoholics, filtered in, but most of them just before the meeting began.  They were getting in their final cigarettes just outside the entrance.  Men and women, youthful and aging, loud and timid,  some dressed for success and others dressed to stay in for the night to watch TV.  The bad lighting, wafting smoke,  and cold metal all annoyed me;  on the pleasant side there was hot coffee, cookies, and enough friendly chatter.   The problem was not the room, however, it was my terror at having at least admitted to myself, in no matter how incomplete a manner, that I had a significant problem and needed help to solve it.  And this was the thing that got me there.  That I had a problem with alcohol had been clear for years, even for decades.  But the recognition that I needed help to stop was the key.  So I went, highly intimidated and jumpy with fear, to my first meeting.

I was sitting among a bunch of strangers, listening to outrageous stories of drunken bad behavior, calmly and candidly told.  I felt paranoid and self-conscious, hoping I would not have to talk to any one.  No one at that meeting could have made me feel at ease and no one did, though some tried.  They were friendly, gave me phone numbers and told me to call if I needed help,  and said encouraging things.  (A few others said bizarre things to me which should have been a clue that there are lots of alcoholics who are simultaneously and independently mentally ill.  God help us all).  The encouragement was enough to overcome the resistance to attending more meetings, but not to overcoming the fear.  Even several years and 12 steps later I am still full of fears, but less so than before, and still not drinking.  And this was worth the agony of the first meeting.

Learned Skills

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.  Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs? ~G.K. Chesterton

Gratitude seems to be a learned skill.  Ingratitude comes fairly naturally, however.  It takes time and effort to develop the habit that makes us cheerful with the little details of life, the little details that are life.  I am alive, I have enough to eat and wear, friends surround me, clean cold fall air fills my lungs, I am healthy and sober and calm, I have strong white teeth and enough cash in my pocket to get me through the day, am enjoying immensely the adventure of life.  I know that God is not only my maker but friend as well;  there is no sane philosophy or religion that says otherwise.  It is marvellous enough that I have been able to live and know the extraordinary people around me (and there are so many of them!), to see the colors of autumn beneath the striking blue of the sky and the bright gold sun, the salty and sweet smells of thanksgiving cooking throughout the house.

And that is enough for the day!