This is, I think, one of the program’s slipperiest slopes. We are all so into helping each other out, sharing our experiences, hopes, and strengths. With the best of intentions, it’s so easy to leave “this worked for me” behind  in favor of “this is what I think you should do.” One is program; the other is advice. Which is not a bad thing, it’s just a different thing.

So here’s what I’ve decided is the line I’m going to try not to cross. The truth is I’ve been sober for quite a long time, and so have a lot experiences to offer other folks in recovery that might actually be useful. I think I cross the line into helping others in order to feel good myself, however, whenever I offer those experiences with an expectation of how the person I’m talking to should respond. In other words, I need to offer what I offer just to pass it on, and not to get something back.

Does that make sense?

Since I’m sworn to tell the truth, I must admit that a very high percentage of my pre-operation thoughts were fixated on taking that pill. I was both appalled and amused to realize that I WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO IT!!!! I beamed right back twenty years ago to how I’d welcomed what I remembered as the pleasant swimmy feeling that drug had always induced in me–before, that is, I began washing it down with Black Jack and risking braindamage and death!

The morning of the surgery came, I took my pill, and waited . . .

Nothing pleasant or swimmy happened. If the truth be told, I felt sleepy and slightly demented.

So much for flirting with my old, wild ways.

The surgery, I’m happy to report, was a raging success!

After a decade of what felt like partisan bickering for bickering’s sake, it feels to me as though we’re abruptly willing to slow down, chill out, and start looking for each other’s  good qualities again. All around me, I’m aware of people reaching out to one another, finding  areas of agreement instead of dispute, open  to working together addressing  the world’s formidable problems.

Boy howdy, does it feel good.

Of course, many credit our president-elect for the resurrection of hope in this country. I saw Senator Obama speak and would be hard-pressed to deny his combination of formidable intellect and inspirational message contributed to America’s psychological turn-around. But I think it runs deeper than that. I think when this country gets off track, there’s something in us as a people that rises up and demands that we do better.

The hope this country seems to feel right now reminds me of the hope I felt when I came in the rooms. I’d spent a pretty miserable, self-destructive couple of years getting myself into them, but once there,I knew all I had to do was  reach out, join hands with my fellow drunks, and together we could get to a much better place.

I hope hope lasts. I plan to do all I can to see that it does. Want to join me?

Perhaps its just that I wasn’t expect to have trouble leaving my own driveway. But there I was caught in the drainage ditch on the other side of the dirt road I live on and going down.

I was going about five miles and hour so there was plenty of time to jump clear. Charlie had gone on ahead on his bike, so I was on my own with a two-wheeled vehicle that weighs considerable more than I do. Plus, I was pretty freaked out.

Okay, I’m also a sober alcoholic. Agitation is bad for me So the first thing I did was calm down. Then I braced one foot against the far edge of the ditch, leveraged my weight against the handlebars, used every ounce of my Cybex-honed strength, and got thatscooter upright again. Then I rolled it out of the ditch and got it and me facing downhill again.

Here’s the deal: THe truth is I was really scared–scared I’d fail, scared I’d wreck the bike, scared I’d hurt myself, for Pete’s sake. But sobriety has also taught me that turning my life over to fear is perhaps the most self-destructive things I can do. So, instead, I repeated my favorite Doobie Brother’s line which goes like this: YOu always have the chance to give up, so why do it now?

And then I got back on that scooter and headed on down the road.

The thing is, I’ve got enough sense to recognize fatigue as being a non-desirable state. When I was still drinking and using, I pushed myself to the edge of collapse and just jazzed away on the buzz. Now, I say to myself–oops, girl, you’ve got to take extra good care of yourself in other ways. You’ve got to eat right, make time for the gym, keep your sense of humor in good repair, not take yourself too seriously!  And  then you’ve got to buckle down and dig yourself out of this immediate and necessary work crunch!

Sobriety is about balancing the pressures of real life–not controlling them.

I spent Friday fretting our world economic crisis and the disturbing appearance of blatant racism in the American presidential campaign.

Saturday and Sunday, I spent a good part of the day scooting.

On a scooter.

A 151 blue teal blue scooter that allows me to travel curvy country roads at speeds that don’t annoy whoever’s behind me and reacquaint me with what it feels like to just be having fun.

Both days were beautiful. Warm and sunny, awash in the slanted, clear light of early fall. Charlie rode with me on one of his sizeable collection of semi-derelict motorcycles. Our house is already in the country, so we just headed out. At crossroads, we turned wherever it looked most interesting, riding through small settlements and farms, responding to waves from children outside playing—because we, too, were playing.

One of the great gifts of sobriety is the permission it’s given me to take a break from dealing with whatever’s making life difficult at the time and do just what Charlie and I did this weekend—play. In sobriety, I’ve learned that when life presses in too hard, it’s okay to go scooting—literally or metaphorically. Whenever life begins to seem dreary and hard, it’s part of my program to encourage myself to do whatever recaptures my sense of joy and gratitude that I’m alive.

Here ’tis. This is part of a larger piece that I’m working on about being in partnership with God. I’d be grateful for any and all feedback. Really, really, really. . .

Knowing that voice within

An atheist father teaches his daughter to do the right thing, and from there she finds God

By Martha Woodroof

July 27, 2008

Pop didn’t hack or howl; he simply left. At 19, he stuck out his thumb and began hitching east, ending up a student at Columbia University in New York City. It was there, I suppose, that he transformed himself into my father: handsome, urbane, erudite, the husband of my mother. By the time I got to know him, the only discernible mark left on Pop by his childhood was a visceral antipathy toward religion.

Pop was pure Marxist in this respect. Religion, to him, had been the opium of his people. He had grown up among those who praised the Lord for not sending them enough to eat. Faith, God, religion—they were all the same, and all nonsense, to Pop.

Pop was, however, ethical to the bone. His insistent, loud-mouthed conscience cost him both money and social prestige. When I look back, it seems strange to me that Pop, who was curious about everything else, seemed to have no curiosity at all about the nature or origin of a person’s conscience. His conscience was there, he obeyed its directions to a fault, and that was the end of it. He had no interest in exploring the presence of this mystery inside himself. Either that, or its presence made him nervous.

My parents moved to North Carolina shortly after they married, so I was raised godless in the Bible Belt, becoming such a worrisome heathen by the 2nd grade that my public-school class would pray over me.

Every Monday morning, my teacher would ask anyone who had not been to Sunday school to stand so that the class might intercede with the Almighty on his or her behalf. Every Monday morning, I stood up alone. I asked my father once if I could lie by staying seated, and he said certainly not, that I was always to stand up for what I believed. And he emphasized that “always” part.

Standing up for my beliefs—both literally and figuratively—was hardship duty when I was a 2nd grader, but it was the only way my father knew to operate. For better or worse, we are our fathers’ students.

The experience toughened me in what I think are good ways, and it also contributed mightily to my growing curiosity about the nature and origin of the human conscience—that touchstone against which, according to my family’s tenets, all actions are to be tested.

As I got older, I increasingly felt a need to give this touchstone a name that signified not just what it did, but what it was. So, sorry Pop, but in my early 40s, I decided that this voice embedded in us that didn’t seem to be of us, this voice that drives us to relate to our fellow humans in ways unrelated to surviving as the fittest, this voice that you, Pop, called your conscience, I would now call God.

I don’t mean to imply that I believe God is some mysterious entity somewhere else that speaks through my conscience; I believe God is my conscience. God is whatever it is in me—and was certainly in you, Pop—that constitutes the commonness of my humanity, that tells me clearly what the next right thing to do or think is, urges me to do it or think it (even when it runs counter to my own self-interest), and gives me the capacity to do it with what feels suspiciously like joy. I don’t get to understand why this still, small voice is there, or how it gets there; I just get to accept that it is there.

I am not now, nor—God willing—ever will be, conventionally religious. In this I remain my father’s younger daughter.

I have no desire to participate in any of society’s attempts to corral the Almighty. It has always seemed to me that Yahweh, the great I Am, is the one truly unfathomable mystery of the universe, and as such can best be related to by me through wordless faith, rather than through religion’s limiting show. God is not something I can explain, but something I accept and live with and listen to. Unlike my father, I enjoy the presence of mystery in me.

As for Pop, he has been dead a decade. I sometimes wonder what he would think now that his daughter has come out of our family’s closet as a person of faith. I’m sure he would applaud me for standing up for my beliefs, but I suspect he would go right on thumbing his nose at God.

I don’t for one moment believe that Yahweh—in whatever way Yahweh considers these things—would think any less of Pop because he never called God by name. We are how we do by each other, after all, and my father did just fine.

Martha Woodroof reports for public radio and is the author of “How to Stop Screwing Up: Twelve Steps to a Real Life and a Pretty Good Time.”

The Warm Springs Gallery in Warm Springs, Virginia (population around 900) had an opening for a rare exhibition of his paintings. Bryan is best known as a writer and illustrator of children’s books. He was one of the first persons of color to present images of children of color in picture books that were not stereotypical. He was, as Poet Nikki Giovanni put it at the opening, a real pioneer.

I was working, of course. On assignment. Yet I can’t remember when I’ve had a better time hanging out with anyone. I think I was not alone in this. The enormous crowd (the gallery was packed to the squishing point) was mostly extremely well-heeled , sedate-looking folks, who appeared to be having a genuinely good time–as opposed to the usual effort-filled good time usually observed at such events.

I think Ashley Bryan’s paintings had something to do with this. He lives on a tiny island off the coast of Maine and this series of canvases were all of the gardens around his home. They were as bright and hopeful as new love, and they passed their brightness and hopefulness on to the audience. Bryan moved among us, charming us without appearing to make the slightest effort to be charming. The man was just so alive it’s catching.

Talking with him before the crowd arrived, I asked him what he’d like to think he brought to the world with his books, his art, his life. In response, he talked about his upcoming birthday. But, he said, every day’s a birth day, for it’s the birth of a new day. If I can convey something of the freshness, the newness, of each day, then I will feel that I’ve put something of myself down on the page.

Not a bad message is it for those of us in recovery, is it, to regard each day as a birth day; as the birth of a new day.

I’d like to suggest it’s the antithesis of sobriety–at least of the all-important part of sobriety that’s manifested by a calm mind.

I re-decided this (for the 89th time!)  a couple of days ago while  talking on the phone while e-mailing someone else while simultaneously doing a web-search while trying to block out a too-loud hall conversation among my colleagues. My mind felt as though it were being–as a wonderful editor friend of mine likes to put it–as though it were being pecked to death by ducks.

I’ve often resolved to just do one thing at a time, but I can never seem to make my professional life work that way. What has disturbed me recently is that I’ve been letting the internal frenzy bleed over into my home life. I create artificial deadlines for writing projects, put too many tasks on my to-do list, and then low-and-behold, I’ve replicated my work-place frenzy. And this is just dumb.

It is, I think, a form of dry drunk. I was a frenzy addict during my drinking years. It’s actually a form of self-importance, I think–this thinking that whatever we are engaged in is so necessary to the welfare of the world that we have to drive ourselves relentlessly to do it.

The 10th Step is endless isn’t it? As an exercise in humility I went back and looked at the chapter I’d written on it in my book and I found this paragraph.

“I’ve discovered that Alice’s (GOD’s)  calming presence is usually felt or lost in the small events of my day. Now please don’t think I spend every waking hour monitoring myself. On the contrary, I probably spend less time thinking about myself nowadays than I have ever done before. I have my morning conversation with Alice, and then I let go of the controls and start enjoying the day. As long as I have established that conscious contact with the God of my understanding, I’ve turned on a gut-level monitoring system that warns me whenever I start heading toward screwy thinking. An alarm goes off just in time for me to veer away from the inevitable consequence of that screwy thinking, which is screwy behavior. I’m able to recognize that I have a clear choice before it is too late.”

Just what I needed–a good talking to myself.

I’ve certainly done my share of damage by shying away from my own discomfort. Back in the early nineties when I was first climbing out of addiction, I ran a railroad crew hotel for about a year. It was the last remaining business in a once-thriving town. At the time, I was filled with the desire to save people as I, myself, had been saved—filled with it to the point of omnipotence. I was certain that I, because of my own experience, could do for other drunks what they could not do for themselves.

Bud was in his seventies, a legendary binge drinker who lived in a derelict store down the tracks from the hotel—or, at least, he lived there whenever he wasn’t on a bender and among the disappeared. I’m naturally friendly, as is my husband. Bud took to hanging around the hotel’s restaurant whenever he was sober. Either Charlie, my husband, or I would give him a bowl of beans and we’d talk. One day Bud took us down to the derelict store, showed us around and told us stories of railroading in its glory days. Another time he took us back in the woods and showed us a ratty old armchair in which he liked to sit. It made my heart hurt to think of this sweet old man surviving in such squalor. I felt a burning need to help him and a luxurious certainty that I knew what kind of help would bring him back into the comfortable folds of mainstream life.

Alas, poor Bud, he became my project, for in those green days of faith, I was still not comfortable shouldering my own discomfort with reality. I still believed that “doing good” relied heavily on doing, and I usually did whatever made me feel the most comfortable.

Bud took to coming in regularly late at night and sweeping out the restaurant. I fussed and made much over his efforts, which pleased him. When this had gone on for a while, I decided here was my chance to make Bud’s life better, and so I offered to turn the old man’s voluntary sweeping into a paying job. All Bud had to do was to commit to keep doing what he was already doing, and I would pay him minimum wage and all the beans—or whatever else we served—that he could eat.

Bud went on a bender that lasted a week, stopped all sweeping, and I think was never again quite as comfortable around me or in the restaurant. Now, I’m not arrogant enough to think I caused that particular bender—Bud is as responsible for dealing with his addiction as I am for dealing with mine. But I did put him under intolerable pressure in trying to avoid my own discomfort with his situation.

Since then, I think I’ve grown into a faith that at least lets me identify my own discomfort for what it is. I can now see that I should have just kept on thanking Bud for his sweeping, and kept on chatting with him over those bowls of beans. If Bud thought he should be paid for his work, I should have allowed him the dignity of saying so. My explanation (not, by any means, my excuse) for my well-meant job-offer is that I was newly sober, newly faithful, and not yet accepting of the discomfort inevitably caused by working in partnership with God.