Remarking Upon Fortune
In the midst of more than a turbulent enough life I forget to take pause and notice the things in my life that are not the events that shake mountains and move nations to great and heinous deeds. But they pass for ordinary and routine events in mine and the lives of ordinary people.
So when I normally mark and remark about the lives of folks who for reasons known best to them and their demons, I spend time in these pages just speaking about how they take up room in my head. But daily I see and am enjoined by people who are the embodiments of success and joy as they day by day place one foot in front of another and just stay sober with great and small efforts on their parts.
And yesterday, after not seeing Oren for about two months, he appeared at our beginner’s meeting to claim his one year coin. What a joy! Quietly but insistently and bravely he came day in and day out.
When asked how he did it he remarked that it wasn’t a quiet year for him despite the fact that he was a quiet participant. After all, after a marriage of 39 years he divorced, his job circumstances had diminished, if not tanked, and he had been forced to sell the house of a decade or more and move into an apartment in a town more than twenty miles from where he was used to staying, into a “retirement” community. A community named for a position in life that he hardly felt qualified to contemplate, in spirit if not in age.
Oren is a larger than life man, with a larger than life heart but a quiet demeanor. He always had doubts as to how firm his grip was on his own sobriety. He would repeatedly say to me in that calm voice of his that he often wondered whether he could maintain his sobriety. And he said this as an offhand comparison to those AA’s with a lot of time under their belts often in wonderment as to how they were able to stash away so much time in the face of all that worry, against all that fear and trouble.
We would compare notes on our lives, both of us professional men, with long marriages, 2.5 children, a colonial house, lone drinkers for long periods of time, successful in our own different yet similar ways.
Then out of the blue, a year ago January, his wife says one morning, “we need to get a divorce”.
“If we had been living the life of Riley, this would have been stupefying, but of course, this did not come as a surprise. In fact, it came as somewhat of a relief from all the tense silences of the past year where things were left ‘unsaid’”.
And I told Oren that this scenario was similar to mine in that one day about three years ago my wife insisted that we had to separate. Where that led me was on a spiral that landed me in an almost mortal health crash a year later. For Oren, after some determined drinking, he thought that the only solution for him was to get sober and that September, last year, he stepped into our meeting on the 26th of this month.
He determined to do ninety meetings in ninety days and during that time I got to know him a bit. And as the year ended and my one year anniversary came around, we started to go out to breakfast after our meetings and began our ‘meetings after the meetings’, the kind of AA substance that is at the heart of the program to keep you sober. Not because it teaches sobriety any better, but it allows others into your life so that they can begin to learn who you are, learn what to expect of you and from you; assess your character, as it were, and learn your moods to know when you are off and on the beam.
It is by gaining that level of familiarity that we begin to entrust ourselves to others so that even before we may notice when we are veering off the sober road, others may begin to be aware of mood, and behavior changes. They will warn us, or make us aware that our attitudes literally may need adjustment.
So I forget that there are daily successes that for all their banality should be paid attention to. Because in AA they need to be recognized; for in here they are rare enough events. The statistics, I am told are really bad. That if you are to look at any particular group of detoxification unit graduates, you will find that perhaps one in twenty will succeed in getting sober.
That is a pretty dismal figure. But we in AA tend to look at it a different way. Because those successes are the result of following a program which we know works, and for those who follow that program, the success rate is 100%. So if you leave a detox unit and join an AA group and then go to a meeting a day, get a sponsor and follow the twelve step program, there is an almost one hundred per cent success rate.
So I note that during the past year Jake now has nine months, Candice, six. Debbie has almost reached her third month and Stacey went off with her husband to Vermont to celebrate the seventh month of her sobriety back after being out of the program for five years.
Just the other day Phil told us his story how, one year after he finally sobered up, he left a wrecked life behind him. To the untrained ear that may sound horrible but to us it is a reaffirmation of who we are and the successes we have become. We know where we have been and celebrate where we are going to.
There is no greatness in our everyday slog toward sobriety. But there is nobility in the effort to stay sober in the measured way that we achieve it, one step at a time, inch by inch, day by day, incrementally. We are sure in the knowledge that at any time that we feel that the security of our sobriety is challenged, we can start our twenty four hour day over again.
We are not bound by the quotidian biological clock to measure our 24 hour periods. Like commandos, we can reset our mission clocks to any time that we need to synchronize it in order to accomplish our goal. And we are clear what that goal is for today and for tomorrow. As for next year, we can take care of that another time.
© res 9/27/11
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