What is the Nature of Our World?

There is a story that goes around about how a reporter once asked Albert Einstein what he thought the most important question facing humanity. He said that the most fundamental question we ever ask ourselves is whether the universe is hostile or friendly.

The young woman I visited in the psych ward sees the world as a hostile place. The chairs are all hard plastic. The mattresses are thin and the blankets thinner. Lights are on 24/7. Someone is often creating a ruckus. One group tv is usually on mute but it hardly matters - who could agree on a shared interest anyway? When she reports her anxiety and asks for meds, they hand her an old battered plastic container of crayons and a piece of paper. The environment is inhospitable on a good day.

I, as a visitor, can agree with her assessment while noticing other details too. The nurse in charge is a friend of mine - a caring professional who loves her patients even when she has to tell them no. I notice also that for weeks before she landed here, this young woman was on the streets of Richmond, VA and it has been a damp, cold, rainy few weeks.

I look around and see the universe is trying to help her; she sees it as a place that disappoints, judges and does not understand her. Her desires rule her life even as they stand in contradiction to her hopes and dreams.

She is fighting for survival but this disease is only managed through the practice of surrender. I have to surrender to the reality that she will probably ditch this place in the morning and use drugs as quickly as possible. My recovery requires me to surrender to the world as it is, not as I wish it to be.

Suffering is not eliminated when we get to the twelfth step, but it is alleviated by this firmly held conviction that the world is a place where God still works alongside his children to make it a better place. In the meantime, we surrender and hope and pray that God will protect this precious one as she continues her journey. And we ask God to give us the strength to do his will which always includes having compassion for the suffering.

Meditation Moment

“The wise men teach us well to save ourselves from treacherous appetites and to distinguish true wholesome pleasures diluted and crisscrossed with pain.”

Michel de Montaigne, “On Solitude”

Sit quietly; close your eyes; imagine that you are wise. Ask and answer: who do I want to be in five years? What small next right step do I want to make on the journey?

We Try...

One cold and rainy Sunday evening I agreed to make a 12-step call to a local psychiatric ward. A young woman checked herself in with the hope of getting sober. Her substance use disorder had become so odious to her that she preferred death to another day of dependence on a drug for survival. Five days in, she was getting sober BUT she could not tolerate the way her body was reacting to the detox process. She HAD to get out. She COULD NOT tolerate this unease for ONE MORE DAY. She was one small step away from ripping out her hair; her body refused to cooperate with her heart’s desire for sobriety. She was unable to manage her body’s complete commitment to using as a way to feel less irritable, restless, agitated, anxious and desperate.

She did not welcome my visit. She knew I was there at the request of her mother and assumed I was there to convince her to finish what she started. I, however, wanted to pick her up and rock her. I wanted to soothe her frayed nerves. I did not want to get her sober or make her stay or manipulate her into behaving. I felt her pain. As I was leaving she said to me, “Hey. I’m out of this place tomorrow. But thanks for showing me compassion. Everyone else just shows up and yells at me.”

In the early years of my own recovery, I mistook 12-step calls for competitions not compassionate care. I thought we were there to snatch someone from the jaws of death. This aggressive evangelistic approach to recovery never worked for me, why did I think that I should work with others?

Today, I focus on the word “tried” in this step. All we do is try. And we do so from the perspective of recovery - with compassion. Other principles that are intrinsic to the steps include: belief and faith in a Higher Power, surrender, humility (not humiliation), forgiveness, wisdom and hope. The twelfth step is about hope. Not perfection. Not about eradicating all our anxieties. My friend is stuck on a psyc ward believing that somehow to get well she must be perfect. Oh how I wish I could convince her that recovery is not so much about change but transformation. Some things do change, some things about ourselves are stubbornly resistant to change. Recovery makes it possible to be good enough, well enough and resourced enough to find help on the days when we are in that freaked out, insecure and neurotic and emotional place (F.I.N.E.) that once triggered our dependencies but today….does not.

Who Believes in You?

How many people thought you’d never change? But here you have! It’s beautiful. It’s strange.

Kate Light, “There Comes the Strangest Moment”

In the early weeks of the quarentine, facebook memes were posted to encourage us to use our time to produce, change, and make the most of our time in isolation. I hated each and every one. I thought about how, someday in the distant future, historians would write about all the ways our world changed after this season of quarantine and anxiety.

Will historians write about our productivity in spite of this crisis or might they chronicle the after-shocks of a world stripped of its favorite dependencies? Who is to say? I do not know.

But I do know this. We are ALWAYS in need of change. One of my “projects” while in quarantine was to take online classes in topics that I hope will make me a better human being. One course was on Motivational Interviewing - wow. It was good and hard. The instructor told us that only 15% of the people who are taught MI actually achieve competency in the practice of MI. Discouraging? Not to me. It simply helps me understand what I am up against. This is hard; I will need a LOT of instruction, practice, feedback, and correction.

And is this not exactly what the 12-steps have trained us for? I did a freaking 5th step!! How tough can it be to have an instructor coach me on improving a skill set that I actually want to learn!

Quarantine is NOT the time to lean into productivity. But we can find purpose, meaning, and reasonably contented moments so long as we are also paying attention and using the tools we have to deal with trauma, stress, and withdrawals from our dependencies.

Today I sent my kids a text: “Anyone who can find and bring to me Minute Maid Lemonade (light) will receive payment and a generous commission.” This is my dependency at work. Fortunately, I have the tools to deal with it and so do you!!! Let’s keep changing in ways that make us better human beings - ok? This is the best way I know to encourage one another!!

Powerlessness and Limitations

If someone tested us on our capacity for carrying the 12-steps anywhere, much less to someone in trouble, how would they measure our competency? I measure my strength by how much I can deadlift; my endurance by how far I can run without keeling over. I measure the state of my marriage through a convoluted and mostly intuitive set of data points honed through decades of marital trial and error. How do I measure my recovery? In AA, the only qualification for attending a meeting is a desire to stop drinking. Each mutual aid group has its own particular dependency it hopes to eradicate. But is “stopping” the only criteria for measuring progress and fidelity to the principles the program teaches? Is the “desire to stop” our only necessary decision?

Remember Step 1 when we had to wrestle with powerlessness and unmanageability? Powerlessness over ______. Hopefully by Step 12, we are not misled by the common misperception that the 12-steps require us to renounce all our power (whatever that means). Powerlessness as a principle is really saying that whenever we do _______, we cannot do it safely. I cannot go on a diet safely. Others cannot drink alcohol safely. Some struggle with using opioids safely. We are not powerless in every dimension of our lives. But the principle here requires that we have the capacity to know where we are truly powerless.

Our powerlessness reveals itself via a particular kind of symptoms and dis-ease. In the first step we tied our powerlessness to our unmanageability. We identify unmanageability often as external factors - DUIs, divorce, debt, loss of jobs. But the heart of unmanageability is the internal emotional state of restlessness, irritability and discontentment.

The twelfth step is not about getting powerful and leading a manageable life. Qualifications do not include a perpetual state of bliss. It is about allowing the process of recovery to alter us in a way that grants us the capacity to give a restless, irritable and discontent person a little compassion. How does that happen? We practice our principles and we learn that compassion is the most sacred expression of any principle worth applying.

I think about the people who have helped me in my life; they were never the loudest voices in the room. They were the ones who showed up with a presence that radiated trustworthiness. They did not present me with answers or suggestions, they offered me compassion and empathy.