Growing out of acceptance

On a recent overnight camping trip to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the main purpose of which was to test out the Subaru on the somewhat difficult Puerto Blanco Drive, I got "caught up" on Melody Beattie's daily meditations that are in her book, The Language of Letting Go. I have the tendency to not read those little one or two page essays for days on end, and then read maybe 10 or 20 of them in a row. It's not the best way to get what she is saying, a lot of the time, because each one can be fairly pithy and provide a lot to think about, as befits the purpose of the book. 

I have some serious issues with her, especially when she leans hard into her archetypal combination of 1980's self help positivism and GOD TALK, just God this, God that, blah God Blah God Blah. It annoys the fuck out of me, frankly. And yet, in one form or another, her writing has provided me with some of the strongest recovery concepts and reminders. As is often the case with recovery literature in general, let alone "self help" books, I am often faced with having to tolerate a ton of ways of putting things that I myself would never employ. Take what works and leave the rest is what recovery people say. Sometimes I have to completely reconfigure everything to even make some of it work at all. 

My recent resistance, funnily enough, is around a few of the themes of acceptance and "plan" or "purpose" that often arise in recovery lit, not only with Beattie. For example, a couple of the entries in a row that I read on this camping trip, October 25 and October 26, go to the heart of what I simply do not believe. Her entry for 10/25, in part: "Our past is neither an accident nor a mistake. We have been where we needed to be, with the necessary people. We can embrace our history, with its pain, its imperfections, its mistakes, even its tragedies. It is uniquely ours; it was intended just for us." And her entry for 10/26, in part: "Today, I will trust that the events in my life are not random. My experiences are not a mistake. The Universe, my Higher Power, and life are not picking on me. I am going through what I need to go through to learn something valuable, something that will prepare me for the joy and love I am seeking."

Okay. Give me a fucking break. Now, I know that a sponsor or another person in recovery would say: "acceptance is the answer to all of your problems! why are you fighting these ideas?" That is the infinite tautology syndrome of a lot of recovery talk that ultimately means jack shit. I want to have conversations with people in recovery who are not buying this crap, though. I want to know that I can reject these ideas of "everything happens for a reason" and, at the same time, stay in recovery. I want room in my recovery for a deeper and more conflicted view of my personal history and of how this shit works. 

Instead of trying to adopt a life philosophy that is abhorrent and seems frankly idiotic to me, as well as fundamentally based on manifest lies, I have had to re-frame these themes of purpose, intention, "everything happens for a reason" and so on. I've arrived at the middle ground of an existential position which is that I am capable of constituting my own sense of the meaning and purpose of my own life, especially in tune with, in an intuitive relationship with, the universe. Here is where I exist, now is when I exist, and I have to have some kind of relationship in that with where I have been and what has happened. 

I do not need to try to force myself to believe a fucking fairy tale, however. I only need to make creative use of my own narrative. I am free, one percent. I can reject whatever the fuck I want or "accept" whatever the fuck I want, and I am not under any obligation, either for recovery or for happiness, to accept "everything." I am responsible for weaving my own tapestry of my own purpose and experience. I have the creative power to make whatever sense out of what I have been through that I feel I need to make. Beyond that, I can just let go and stop trying. 

This works much more powerfully for me than this strange idea that "everything happens for a reason." It works a lot better for me when dealing with tragedy, abuse, trauma, unacceptable loss and change, excruciating suffering and the bare, plain, utterly clear facts of being alive on this planet. It feels to me like it's a bigger way to meet the realities of life. NOTHING happens for a reason without me weaving it into a narrative that works for me. And that narrative ONLY has to work enough for me to continue in recovery. And if I can't weave it into something meaningful for myself, then the skill I truly need is the skill of being in mystery and uncertainty, not the faux certainty of an unacceptable proposition that, in my very gut, feels like a damnable lie.

This gets close to how it is that I am an atheist and yet work, on a daily basis, with a Higher Power. I sometimes say that my Higher Power is reality. Reality is a power greater than myself, that is for damn sure. And if I can be a lover of reality and radically accept that here is where I am and now is when I am here, then I have a very powerful place to start living. I don't need to accept bland and fairy tale style propositions and try to get next to the idea of a "loving God" who is somehow "guiding all of my life" or whatever. All of that shit is just abhorrent to me, and to many other people I know who are growing in recovery just fine without it. What I do need is to live my life with courage and authenticity, and take responsibility for making sense of my experience, and stop trying to explain those aspects of my experience that are inexplicable. For me, this is rigorous honesty. 

The path is co-created. I have agency in all of it. And in these ways, I leave behind all of the recovery philosophy of "surrender" to a power greater than myself. Shared creation, shared care, and a responsibility for making sense of myself in my experience is the way my past becomes "useful" or "purposeful" for me. This feels like moving from a spiritual childhood with a parental Higher Power, to more of a "grown up" life, with a co-creative call and response, intuitive presence and narrative making consciousness that rejects comfortable lies.