A LIFE EXAMINED

A LIFE EXAMINED
This is the time of the year when we reflect upon the year gone by, the progresses made, battles won, skirmishes lost. We take stock of our position on the battle field in the hope that an armistice if not a peace may be neigh. We remember with some trepidation the adage 'an unexamined life is not worth living'.

For us alcoholics the truck through the year from hard drinker to becoming solidly sober is a hard and difficult one. One harried with the dangers of recidivist backsliding. One fraught with thoughts that 'I could have just one drink and that wouldn’t hurt'. One where the notion of controlled drinking is the ever present siren song ready to thrust us upon the shoals of a fatal shore.

We are constantly challenged by sugar plum visions of drinking in happy times ( I can’t remember when that ever was) and how pleasant it would be to just experience those pleasant soirees. But truly there never were gentle soirees and the best of the happy times were when we remembered where the car was parked and who we were with the night before.

Yet we somehow harken back to these fictionally romantic times as if that would permit us to drink like normal people. Well we can’t and we never will. And that is the sober truth about the notion of 'controlled drinking'. If we could have controlled our drinking, we would not be in AA today. If we could control our drinking, we would not have had:

A) All those speeding tickets or DWIA’s
B) All those lost weekends
C) All those lost friends
D) All those lost and ruined marriages
E) All those lost cars and parking places
F) All those lost lives and souls.

Truly, controlled drinking is not in our nature, because our nature is not to be in control. And at the base of all this magical thinking is the reality of our constant striving to escape from ourselves, the need to dull the reality of life under the grit of a Morpheus substance.

Louisey, another blogger, has described the difficulty of living the 'unmediated and unbuffered' life as the 'unbearable nature of the untransformed consciousness'. How literally true that is. We can’t stand ourselves or life unless we dull our perception of life to protect us from harsh reality intruding upon our conscious existence.

That is, when we come right down to it, we all have to find a kinder and gentler way of living with ourselves. And I think the reason that we either succeed or fail in AA is that we finally come to an accommodation with ourselves if not to understand us in all our complexities, then at least to accept our complexity as part and parcel of who we are.

We may not always apprehend ourselves at the end of the day, but this accommodation allows us to exist, and with that permit us the time to ‘examine life to make it worth living.’

© res 12/20/10