I’m sitting in the Bagel Nosh, a little half-baked cafe in Phoenix just down the street from my parent’s time share.
It’s a gorgeous day, mid-seventies. A far cry from the grey and wintery white that has blanked Indiana for the past month. Truthfully, though, the grey and the winter haven’t bothered me this year, not in the way that it has in the past. Perspective has much to do with that.
It’s still nice to awake at 630 am, walk outside in shorts and go for a run without shivering the first few miles. There’s something to be said for the sun and happiness. Of course, there is something to be said for many things and happiness.
But these vignettes may be an interesting way to approach the concept.
***
I have made the decision to expend as little psychic time and energy on those people who have allocated their time away from me. That’s an impersonal way for saying the truth of it, but this accomplishes the goal.
What’s distressing to me is this: the anger I feel towards some of these people is very real, and in my head, justified. It would be in-human not to feel that.
Yet I’ve seen the change brought about in me by The Program, the change that came when I was on the brink of collapse.
I wonder, as I remove these people from my life, I wonder about my own second chance. Of course, these are not alcoholics. If they were, the choice would be easy. Our hand is always extended to the alcoholic who suffers.
These are simply people, damaged in ways I don’t understand, who cut a swath of damage and pain around them and believe they have no responsibility in it.
I wonder, though, if I am doing a dis-service to my own recovery by removing these people from my life or if am I finally doing what normal human beings do.
***
The hardest thing for me is saying no.
I’ve joked throughout my sobriety that I don’t have an alcohol problem, I have a drinking problem. I will drink several pots of coffee each day, if I get started early. I’ll drink pitches of water in short order. And, back in the day, I would put back a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey in an evening if I was so inclined.
But my No Problem extends throughout much of my life: work, personal relationships, hobbies.
If there is an opportunity to take on something new, I find myself jumping in. I will try anything. At least once. Oftentimes more than once.
I will cajole, maneuver and push to wrangle my way into parts of life that I had no real inclination to get involved with and I will do it simply because the opportunity arose.
I have lived a life in full and in full throttle.
Once my travels are done this year, however, my goal is to say no. To settle. To relax. To live life, even if just for a blip in time, slowly.
***
I’m not sure where I got the idea that more is more.
That idea is ingrained to the point that I have become entombed by my own devices. Not that every adventure, every yes has been problematical. That would be wrong and ridiculous. I am amazed and awed by the events that have unfolded.
But they have never been enough. There is an underlying fear that if I just skip something, if I miss out, that I will have given up my one opportunity to do…something.
It’s that ever-elusive something that’s the problem, though. It exists in my head as an ever-changing thing. Happiness always just…out…of…reach. So I pile on another adventure, another person, another thing.
***
The Year of Health, The Year of Friends are, I’ve just realized today, about something very basic: deleting.
This year is about clearing out the bits and pieces of wreckage, the holdovers from my drinking life. From the chaos. It’s about brushing aside the bad.
Not the friends and adventures that are mine, but everything around me that isn’t. Everything I have chased or grabbed or latched on to for reasons I can’t quite understand. It’s about saying no to people, to opportunities and adventures. It’s about determining the life that I want to have, choosing a path and then making a go of it.
That means, for me, deleting.
