Sobering

Fourteen years of sobriety today. Grateful, humbled and kind of weirded out. 

Time is very strange. It absolutely does not seem like fourteen years since I got sober on Easter Sunday, 2004. It's not that a whole ton of life hasn't happened over that time, because of course it has. It's more like all of that time just seems to have vanished. And I can project forward and realize that in fourteen years, I will be an impossible 70 years old, if I am still here. 

The logarithmic theory of time consciousness (tm) explains why our perceptions are this way as we get older. That is, each unit of time, no matter how you count it, is a smaller portion of our total experience, and so seems shorter by comparison, the more time we experience. At 4 years old, the next year marks a full 20% of our existence. At 56, the next year marks a mere 1.8% of our total experience. In this way, each constant unit of time shrinks by comparison. We wouldn't use seconds to talk about the time between the Pleistocene and now. We perhaps should not use years to talk about the time between when I was, say, 30, and now. Instead of years piling up, it begins to feel like large swaths of time pile up. Not quite decades, but you get the idea. 

I do not feel 56 and I do not feel 14 years sober. If I had to peg an age on how I feel, most days I would say I guess I feel about 36. And I feel one day sober, most of the time. Like: today. It's a cliche of the program, but it's true for me. 

What does sobriety mean to me? Literally, life. As I bottomed out 14 years ago, I was combining huge quantities of ethanol with benzos, quite frequently. Nearly every night, 12-18 beers, 5-7 shots of Wild Turkey 101 and an ativan, or two. Many mornings, it was a distinct possibility that I would not wake up. When I looked back, I realized I was terrified of dying but at the same time secretly hoping I would "accidentally" die. This is a dark, despairing and torturous way to live. 

But far more than just being alive, which in and of itself has no essential value, I get to be conscious. I get to experience my life and remember it. I get to learn how to show up for it, in spite of mistakes, sometimes very serious ones. I get to have an experience of living a life with purpose. I get the gift of being useful to others. I get to be free, to the extent that our conditioned existence ever permits freedom. In particular, I get to be increasingly free within my consciousness. This in itself is the greatest gift of all. 

It may be the case that the most precarious existence of all is played out in addictive behaviors of all kinds. One of my old mentors in AA, may she rest in peace, used to say "That which manages you is your God." To be managed by dependence on ethanol is a miserable existence. Or dependence on another human being, who is, after all, human. Or on gambling, or spending, or food. The maddening irrationality of the addict is particularly reflected by our weird choices to rely 100% on the most unreliable things. On substances and behaviors that leave us deserted, hollow, abandoned and full of despair. 

In fact, the clearest conception I have of my higher power is that "it" is reliable. It is the only reliable connection. I mean, my higher power is "reliability." The experience of connection is the same as an experience of a ground of being, somewhere solid to put my feet. What's wild about this existential sense is that I don't need "God" in order to experience it. I am an atheist. But I have a higher power. I try to explain this to a lot of people in recovery and only some seem to understand. 

Anyway, it seems like another way to frame learning how to live sober is that I have developed ways to bring myself into alignment with reality. With what is. And in a metaphysical way, with an existential sense of "isness" that is a ground of being. Of all the things I get to show up for, this seems the greatest gift. If I align myself with that experience, my life unfolds with weird and mysterious logic.