I’ve sat on both couches and in almost every chair in the apartment at least once this morning. I’ve walked from one room to another innumerable times and have even lain down on the living room floor for a while trying to come up with something to write about. It’s not usually a struggle for me, but for some reason today my mind is a complete blank.

In fact, having written the paragraph above, I’ve been to the kitchen twice and have put on a new CD with the hopes that it will spark my imagination. In some respects, that’s part of the problem, I suppose—the expectation that I need to know what I’m writing about before I’m actually writing about it. In fact, as I’ve been moving from chair to chair, room to room, I’ve been waiting for an idea to come to me fully formed and ready to go.

It’s not a new problem, as I’ve been prone to this kind of thinking in the past, particularly during the years of my active alcoholism: show me the outcome first and then I’ll decide if I want to take the actions necessary to make it happen.

Unfortunately, things don’t seem to work out that way in real life. More often than not, action precedes understanding, and it’s usually the case that I need to get started with a given endeavor before I have any idea whether or not it will work out in the end.

There’s a certain amount of vulnerability in this approach and a requisite amount of faith that’s necessary. It reminds me of the Wile E. Coyote cartoons of my youth where the coyote suddenly finds himself running in mid-air, having sped, unknowingly, off the edge of a precipice, his legs still churning in hot pursuit of the Road Runner. And then there’s that moment when the reality of his predicament becomes painfully clear: Oops! Wrong choice.

I’ve reached that moment a number of times in a number of different ways throughout my life, realizing all too late that my legs were spinning in mid-air. Nevertheless, like the coyote, I’ve survived all kinds of mishaps, ultimately taking up pursuit of the Road Runner once more, beginning again, undaunted.

In the end, I suppose that’s the lesson I’ve learned, a lesson taught in meditation, cartoons, and other spiritual disciplines: It’s okay to fail repeatedly and, when you find yourself at a dead end, simply begin again. 

I’m amazed the Valentine’s Day flowers I gave my wife last week are still blooming. Even more, I’m amazed I gave them to her in the first place.

When it comes to much-hyped events like Valentine’s Day and other such holidays concocted by advertising executives, I’m a bit of a grouch. I don’t take well to being told what to do, or, more importantly, what to feel. Nevertheless, since I’ve been sober, I’ve also learned that it’s possible for me to do the next right thing, whether I want to or not.

When I was drinking, unfortunately, I had an uncanny ability for doing the next wrong thing. If there was something that could make a bad situation worse, I usually found it. More often than not, I was a one-man Keystone Kops reel. I would spill a drink at a party I hadn’t even been invited to. In trying to mop it up I would knock over a lamp. When somebody tried to help, I’d insist on cleaning it all up myself, dropping a cigarette ash onto the couch. It would escalate like this, and before long, people were pushing me out the door and shouting, “Don’t ever come back.” 

Sobriety, though, has changed all that. Now, even though I’m sometimes unsure just what the next right thing to do might be, I usually have a pretty good idea of what not to do.

So, when my kids started asking me a few days before Valentine’s Day, “So, Dad, what are you going to get Mom?” I knew my stubborn refusal to go along with the crowd was going to have to bend. It’s a yearly exercise, and annually I vow not to give in to the pressure and to stand strong in my unwillingness to participate. 

I held firm for a while, answering my kids’ questions with the usual, “Nothing. I’m getting nothing,” though I knew they knew that I knew that somewhere along the line I was going to blink. Clinging angrily to my own willfulness is usually the first sign that I’m heading toward the next wrong thing instead of the next right one and getting the flowers was, in fact, the next right thing to do.

For me, doing the next right thing is a direct outgrowth of AA’s Sixth Step, “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.” As noted in the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, this is the step that “separates the men from the boys”—the step that highlights the difference between “striving for a self-determined objective and for the perfect objective which is of God.”

Now, I don’t believe God specifically wanted me to go out and buy a bunch of flowers for my wife, yet I’m quite certain that finding ways to overcome my willfulness and my stubborn adherence to negative perceptions of the world is critical to my ongoing spiritual growth. As the Sixth Step notes, “The moment we say, ‘No, never!’ our minds close against the grace of God. Delay is dangerous, and rebellion may be fatal. This is the exact point at which we abandon limited objectives, and move toward God’s will for us.”

So, if it took swallowing a little pride and getting a bouquet for my wife, it was well worth it.

And who knew the flowers would still be blooming so long after the moment had passed?

Shangri-la has finally come to my neighborhood. The Shangri-la Express, that is. Described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton, "Shangri-La" is a mystical, harmonious valley at the western end of the Kunlun Mountains, a mythical Himalayan utopia—a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world.

The Shangri-la Express, however, is a food cart that seems to have taken up permanent residence on the corner of Broadway and 111th street, directly under the bedroom window of my apartment. It appeared out of the blue a week or so ago and has been a great hit with the college students who populate my neighborhood, serving up cheap Falafels, Lamb gyros and the apparently ever-popular Shangri-la Chicken Combo.

The problem for me is that the cart is a little too popular, and the proprietor, a USMC veteran, or so it says on the side of his cart, seems to stay open almost 24 hours a day and has set up a generator and a neon “open” sign that is attached to the side of the cart.

In fact, just the other night at 2 a.m., my wife and I were woken by a rowdy crowd of college students gathered around the cart just below our window, stirred to riotous heights, no doubt, by the possibility of a late-night snack of Tibetan Beef Patties or Vegetable Biryani.

Unfortunately, I have a bad history with being woken up by street noise and have been known to toss an egg or two from my bedroom window, anonymously of course, in response to the many late-night disruptions that New York City has to offer, such as the college bar across the street that disgorges drunken patrons at an alarming rate who linger on the sidewalk, shouting, fighting, and waiting for their friends.

My wife, too, has a low tolerance for being woken up in the middle of the night and, for her part, has even been known to toss a couple of Dannon Yogurts out the window in an effort to quell a disturbance. That particular effort didn’t go very well, however, and prompted a series of retaliatory moves by the youths involved. This scared my wife and she ended up calling the police, sheepishly admitting when asked by the officer taking the call why the youths were trying to enter our building, “I tossed a yogurt at them out the window.” “A yogurt?” asked the officer. “Well, actually, two yogurts,” responded my wife, truthful to the end.

So, when the unruly crowd gathered around Shangri-la the other night, waking us both at 2 a.m., I was uncertain just how to proceed. My first thought was simply that it would all go away in a minute. However, unfortunately, it didn’t and the noise continued to float up from the street, through our closed windows, at a high decibel level. 

One of the things I have learned in my own search for spirituality is that I have within me both the seeds of anger and the seeds of serenity, among other things, and it depends, in many ways, on which one I water, metaphorically, as to which will ultimately flower and grow.

Watching the anger at the disruption build within me, my reaction to the noise below, I realized that watering this particular sprout of annoyance would lead directly down a path I had already traveled, with little satisfaction, many times before. And yet, the more I listened to the noise, the louder it got and the longer it extended, I found myself unable to resist and, foregoing the eggs, tossed an obligatory wad of wet paper towels out the window, aimed, in a general way, at the crowd gathered below, accompanied with a shouted “There are people trying to sleep up here,” which probably woke more people in my building than the noise coming from the street.

Predictably, the wet paper towel proved ineffectual and after lodging an official noise complaint with the local police precinct—a practice that has proved similarly ineffectual in the past, since by the time the police mosey by to check it out, often an hour or so later, the disturbance has passed—I decided it was time to take a look at my own anger and try to let it go.

Accepting my own powerlessness in matters both big and small has provided me with a great deal of relief in the past, and while some look at powerlessness as a symptom of defeat, I look at it as an opportunity to abandon fruitless struggle and refocus my energies on what I can actually affect. Do I really want to spend my life lurking at the bedroom window, tossing wet paper towels, or eggs, or Dannon Yogurt containers every time I am awoken in the night? Why not commit myself, then, to Shangri-la, to watering the seeds of serenity rather than feeding the anger inside of me?

So today I stopped by the cart to peruse the menu and break down my antipathy toward its very existence. I will admit, the Tibetan dumplings looked especially tasty, and the Chicken kebab smelled appetizing, indeed. I decided to start off slow, however, in my new resolve, and just ordered a Falafel. I’ll save the Chicken combo for another day. After all, while I may not sleep well in Shangri-la, at least I can always eat. 

Change is not the most popular word in an alcoholic’s vocabulary, but it’s one that cannot be ignored. For me, over the years, its perception and ultimate implementation in my life has, well, changed.

As an active alcoholic, change was something to be avoided at all costs, that is, of course, unless it somehow meant me getting more of what I wanted. If everybody else was willing to change to suit my particular needs and perception of how the world should be, then change was indeed something to be exalted, encouraged, and embraced with open arms.

However, if it meant that I had to change my own behavior to suit the world around me, it was definitely nothing but an evil plot, another misguided attempt by a hostile world to muzzle and subjugate free thinkers like me.

But change is something that can occur on a subconscious level, too, like an underground aquifer redistributing water below the surface. In my own life I experienced this kind of change in the years before I got sober, the foggy years at the end of my drinking. 

I am one who kept a journal for many years, cataloging in drunken, illegible scrawls the various twists and turns of my inner life. For me it was a full-time job, and I came to live more fully in my journal than I was living in everyday life.

Somewhere along the way, however, below the level of conscious choice, my handwriting actually began to change, from the cursive script I had learned as a child and carried with me through high school and college, to a more type-driven, individual block letter approach. It was as if some fundamental change was working its way to the surface, yet I never actually made a decision to pursue any particular course of action to bring it into being. 

Oddly, it was ultimately a change so distinctive that if one looked back in my journal on either side of the very temporary period of transition, the words would appear to have been written by another person. Unfortunately, though, while the actual writing had transformed, the words and the writer had not, and I continued drinking and carrying on with exactly the same kind of insanity as before.

Some years after the subconscious, underground changes to my handwriting, however, which seem in retrospect to have been a harbinger of things to come, I underwent what I would call a wholesale change where in the space of one evening I passed through a spiritual membrane of sorts, on one side of which was drunkenness and on the other was sobriety. It was the night I went to my first AA meeting and, though I didn’t know it at the time, the night of my last drink.

With that one huge alteration in my life, I began to undergo what I would call a series of incremental changes, changes that in and of themselves seemed uneventful but, when tacked on to the one just previous and the one just ahead, made my life as a newly sober alcoholic actually possible. Things as simple as walking on a different side of the street than I had always walked on before, especially if the old side of the street brought me past familiar liquor stores and old haunts. Changing the people, places and things that had populated and begun to strangle my life; incremental changes that began to move me away from the darkness toward the light.

As I began successfully staying away from a drink, however, I opened the door to my superstitious nature and moved into a period of forced changes, changes meant to solidify the progress I was making and guarantee success over negative odds in the future. It was a period of making rules, especially as they related to my prosecution of the AA program.

If something worked once, it became necessary to repeat it over and over again. For example, I found great solace in a meditation book focused on recovery and would read a page or so each morning before heading off to work. Before long, it became a rule and I felt like I had to do it or the world would somehow tilt out of its normal axis and dump a load of garbage directly into my life. I actually became afraid of not doing it and found myself one morning already on the way to work when I realized I hadn’t done my morning meditation and actually turned around and went back to my apartment, even though I was already late, to obsessively read through the meditation. Later that day, however, I realized that I had no idea what I had actually read that morning and came to understand that the rules I was erecting were actually just a way of keeping necessary changes out.

So, changes come to all of us, often unbidden, occasionally unwelcome, yet always trailing some new kind of opportunity or awareness.

I’m not always happy about change; I have grown more appreciative of stability over the years. Yet, I no longer feel change as a threat. It—and I—can coexist with the lifestyle I’ve developed after thirty-plus years of sobriety and, though I may grumble a bit when it comes a-knockin’, I recognize that change is a vital aspect of my relationship with a higher power. An aspect I can’t ignore. 

My friend John G. was admitted to the intensive care unit of a Staten Island hospital quite a number of years ago after a long period of uncontrolled boozing and drug use. He was admitted in a blackout and, as he told it over the years, had no idea where he was when he eventually cleared up enough to care. It certainly wasn’t his first hospitalization for alcoholism and drugs, or his last, but it always provided a moment of levity for those of us who knew John.

It seems that John’s room was across the hall from the nurses station and as he lay there, slowly returning to a modicum of sobriety, periodically he would hear one of the nurses calling out in a low voice, “I see you.” Jangled as his nerves were and cranky as he was fast becoming, he didn’t find a great deal of humor in the situation. He was never one for games, and the idea of the nurses playing peek-a-boo with him was growing old real quick.

Finally, his patience wore down and out of exasperation he responded in a gruff barroom baritone the next time he heard the nurse. “I see you, too,” he shouted from his bed, drifting off again into a deep sleep.

It wasn’t until he awoke some time later, as the cob webs continued to lift from his brain, that he realized he was across from the nurses station and what he was hearing was not a peek-a-boo game but the nurses answering the telephone, “I.C.U.” 

Unfortunately, John died last week, many years after his hospitalization in the I.C.U.—years filled with the wonders of sobriety, as he was finally able to put down the drink and the drugs and stay sober for over 33 years. Unfortunately, though, he had put a lot of hard miles on his body during his active alcoholism, especially on his liver, and ultimately his body gave out. He died at the age of 69, leaving behind a host of family members and friends.

With the kind of life John led before getting sober—alcoholism, heroin addiction, prison—it’s no surprise that he died. What’s a surprise is how long he lived. 

John was committed to sobriety and his life offered powerful testimony to the process and possibilities of recovery. In his late fifties, following a career in the alcoholism field, John retired. But it didn’t last long. 

After a lengthy layoff and two grown daughters, John became a father again, this time to a son. Uncertain at first how this was going to work, John grew more and more attached to the idea of fatherhood again and it provided him with renewed purpose and vigor. Thinking he had left all his parenting years behind, new doors started opening and John was able to provide at the end of his life for his son what he hadn’t been able to provide earlier in his life for his daughters: stability, loving attention, and care.

Not one to forego a second chance, either as an alcoholic or a father, John made the best of his life and shared it freely with others.

Happily, thanks to John, whenever I hear the words “I see you,” I will always smile.   

I was happily eating a crunchy toasted almond granola bar yesterday when an old filling in one of my back teeth fell out. Suddenly there was something not so tasty that I was chewing on and I knew right away things weren’t quite right. Either the granola bar was filled with pebbles, or it was time to visit the dentist.

I’ve never been particularly attentive to my teeth. Going to the dentist has never been high on my list of fun things to do. In fact, I’m one of those people who almost never make the trip until—and unless—there’s some kind of crisis.

My wife, on the other hand, is a believer in dentistry and is regularly attentive to her dental health. When I mentioned to her over dinner that I had lost a filling, she asked when I had last gotten my teeth cleaned. It seemed like such an irrelevant question, given the now gaping hole in one of my molars, but it highlighted for me the reality that teeth, among other things, are often better appreciated through regular maintenance rather than catastrophic reconstruction.

Like so many things in life, my reticence to visit the dentist has its roots in childhood, as I was one who was put through the ordeal of orthodontics and had my mouth filled with numerous metal configurations for a number of years during my adolescence. I never did understand the purpose of it all, convinced as I was that there was really nothing wrong with an overbite and that it was somehow nothing more than arcane punishment for having sucked my thumb for far longer than my family thought I should.

In the end, I don’t know if the braces actually did what they were supposed to do in terms of straightening out my teeth, but I was ultimately so relieved when they were taken off that I said a silent prayer of thanks and resolved never to darken the dentist’s doorway again.

I have grown up slightly, however, in the intervening years and have attended to the various dental crises that have come up from time to time, though I have never truly given in to the kind of regular attention my wife ascribes to, the kind of attention that might make some of the major difficulties less imposing.

As someone who has worked in the field of alcoholism, you’d think I would be more cognizant of the philosophy of prevention, yet the lessons learned in one area of life are not always so easily applied in another.

Regarding prevention, alcoholism-style, one of my favorite descriptions comes from Marty Mann, an early sober alcoholic in AA and the founder of today’s National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence. In discussing her work in the alcoholism field, dealing with the consequences of alcoholism on a daily basis, Marty likened it to setting up shop at the base of a cliff, ministering to those who had fallen over the edge of alcoholism and crashed below.

Important as that work was, she noted, somebody ought to get up there on the cliff and start posting some signs so that people might have more of a chance of understanding alcoholism and addiction before simply dropping over its edge.

On a greater and deeper scale, it’s the kind of prevention my wife was counseling with having my teeth cleaned, and while I can understand and recognize the incredible value in prevention as it relates to alcoholism and addiction, it’s much harder for me to comprehend when it comes to having my own teeth cleaned.

So, while I can feel the childhood resistance building, it’s time to bite the bullet and make the call. And once the filling has been replaced, or the root canal has been completed, perhaps I’ll make that appointment to have the rest of my teeth cleaned.

There’s a saying I’ve often heard in recovery that is meant to provide guidance in times of emotional duress. It says, simply, “When you get to the end of your rope, make a knot and hold on.”

It’s good advice, I’ve found, based on the many times I have gotten to that point myself where it seems there is nothing else I can do in a given situation, and yet, if I can hold on just a little longer, answers appear and unexpected help arrives in ways I couldn’t possibly have imagined.

It’s happened for me that way, time and again. Unfortunately, over the years, I have also heard the same saying with a slightly different ending, an ending that actually makes as much sense to me as the first. It says, “When you get to the end of your rope, let go.” 

Some might find the discrepancy here disturbing, yet for some strange reason, I find it oddly comforting. I’ve never enjoyed being told what to do, and having a saying like this floating around offering two completely different options is reassuring to my rebellious nature. It does, however, propose a tactical dilemma. What, exactly, should one do at the end of their rope?

As one who has had plenty of experience in that position, it turns out both approaches actually have one thing in common. In each case, what is suggested at the end of the rope is turning to a Higher Power for help—in one case, by holding on and not giving up five minutes before the miracle, and in the other, by letting go and trusting that somehow God will break the fall.

What’s comforting to me is that both approaches work and I realize that it’s possible to successfully get through life, sometimes holding on and sometimes letting go. In a way, it’s like swinging through the jungle, holding on to one vine until another appears, then letting go and holding on to the next one, swooping through life, one experience at a time.

Some people have rabbit’s feet or a pair of dice or a St. Christopher’s medal hanging from the rear-view mirror of their cars. It’s a time-honored tradition, a sort of talisman to protect against the uncertainties of life. Me? I have a small figurine of Tarzan suspended from the mirror of my car on a piece of fishing line.

It’s one of those action figure dolls, with moveable parts, and it reminds me of the different options I have when I’m feeling panicky—I can either let go or I can hold on.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter, since what I’m really doing is turning my life and will over to the care of a Higher Power. If I’m able to do that, it doesn’t particularly matter which rope I’m on.

I ran into the mother of one of my youngest daughter’s friends on the street the other day. She’s somebody I’ve known for many years, as our daughters have gone to school together since kindergarten, yet she’s not somebody I’m particularly close to.

We’ve shared some personal information back and forth over the years, but I generally just see her at school functions—class picnics, school plays, and the like.

As I saw her coming down the block, she looked much smaller than I remembered, sort of shrunken into herself. She had, in fact, lost a considerable amount of weight and I recalled my daughter mentioning something about cancer. 

As we approached each other, there was a remoteness to her face, her demeanor, as if she were enveloped in a tightly-fitted, vacuum-sealed box. She didn’t look particularly unfriendly or surprised to see me; she looked, instead, completely alone.

It was a feeling I immediately identified with—a deep sense of sadness, an irreconcilable gloom, a hopelessness so compelling as to provide an aura of stoic grace.

She slowed as we met, yet never stopped. We exchanged a sentence or two of greetings, though her momentum continued inexorably down the block and the encounter was over in just a few seconds.

I thought about it as I continued on in the opposite direction. It hadn’t been particularly awkward or unusual to have passed each other without stopping to chat, yet there was something haunting about her loneliness. It was something I could feel, sense, intuit, yet it wasn’t something I could interrupt or redirect.

Our relationship was not of the kind where I would have felt comfortable stopping her on the street and asking her anything directly. “So, do you have cancer? How are you feeling? It looks like you feel terribly alone.” These were not phrases I could have employed.

So I simply continued on.

At night, though, as I lay in bed, I pictured her face, its hopelessness and icy resolve. I imagined that instead of passing each other we had stopped, taken a moment and stood together. There was nothing meaningful I could imagine saying, but in my mind I pictured simply reaching out, putting my arm around her shoulder and walking with her for a block or so, in silence.

For me, it was like a prayer. I often think I know what is best for people—that this one should be cured of his fatal malady or that one should be relieved of her emotional pain. Yet I realize there’s no way I can resolve another’s loneliness or divert their pain; I can, however, share in it for a moment.

Sometimes that’s the best I can do. And perhaps the next time I see her I’ll be better able to connect in a more personal way, to inquire more directly how she is, or, if nothing else, simply to linger a moment or two longer before parting ways.

Trees Do It

There’s a tree outside my bedroom window that has lost nearly all of its leaves. There are a few stragglers left, clinging to the tips of the otherwise bare branches, fluttering defiantly in the wind. I found myself this morning looking out and thinking, What are they waiting for?

Autumn is traditionally a time for letting go and most of the leaves’ brethren have already bid farewell, impressively so over the last month, going out in a blaze of Technicolor glory. But these few stubborn holdovers got me to thinking. What am I still holding onto that I should be letting go of instead?

As a recovering alcoholic, it’s easy to think back and remember a time that was characterized not by the concept of letting go but rather by the notion of holding on, at all costs, to the few things I felt were actually keeping me alive—like the alcohol, for example. I really did think that drinking is what was keeping me going, not what was pulling me down. 

Getting sober was my first real experience of letting go, of simply releasing that which I could no longer support. Essentially, I had reached the tipping point where it was either alcohol or me; one of us had to go.

That began for me a kind of personal autumn, a prolonged period of stripping away a lot of images and mythology that I had about myself—who I really was and who I thought I was. Once I had gotten down to the bare bones, the foliage began to grow back and, while it hasn’t always been without struggle, I have enjoyed many years of continued growth and wellbeing.

But, the leaves outside my window reminded me this morning that it isn’t always easy to let go and that, even when all signs point toward its necessity, there can still be considerable resistance to letting go.

For instance, the resentment I have been nurturing over the last couple of months with a family member. The resentment has its roots way back in my childhood, but recent events have brought it to the surface again. It’s a resentment I thought I had put to bed many years ago, but its new configuration at this point in time has forced me to look at it again, in a slightly different light.

Like one of the leaves still clinging to the branches against all odds, I have found this resentment has given me a certain energy over the past few months, as if it were catching and transforming every last possible bit of light from the sun. 

My wife has asked me a number of times this fall, “Are you ready to let this go?” and my answer has been consistently “No.” It’s inevitable to me that I will, in fact, let go of this resentment. It just doesn’t make sense to hold onto it. My father is 87 years old, after all, and it’s just not reasonable to think that his behavior is all of a sudden going to change. Yet it has also been important for me to recognize my own anger relative to my relationship with my father—much of which has been positive since I got sober—and to realize how hurt I have been, both long ago as a child and more recently as an adult, by what I perceive as his inability to see who I really am.

It’s getting colder though, and I need to conserve energy. It’s natural to let things go—trees do it—and I am looking forward to the day when the last leaves of resentment finally separate from the limb, skittering off in the wind, taking their final moments on nature’s incomparable stage before settling down in earnest for the long winter.