Sobriety Actually

What does it take to be sober a long time?

Easy.  Don’t drink, don’t die.

Which is to say, longevity in sobriety––29 years for me––is not necessarily much of an accomplishment.  It’s not nothing.  But it isn’t joy.

“No recovering alcoholic dies happy because they stopped drinking,” my sponsor Pete told me way back when.  “If they die happy, it’s because of what they did after they stopped drinking.”

It took me a while to learn that.

Every drunk has his or her own relationship with recovery.  I drank for 30 years, yet giving up was easy once the message arrived with the subtlety of a guillotine that my options were change or die.

That may not seem like much of a revelation if you’re unfamiliar with addiction, but for an addict the specter of losing one’s life is not always a deterrent.  Hence the bromide: “Death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to us, only the last thing.”

Call me lucky.  Not once in all these years have I had the urge to drink, or use any other form of chemical alteration.

The reason isn’t virtue.  I think it’s that I wasn’t actually addicted to alcohol.  Alcohol wasn’t what I craved.  What I craved was running from pain.  Alcohol was simply a very convenient vehicle of escape.

In the first five years of sobriety, I reveled in the wonder of a new life.  But soon I started to feel I’d gotten about all I could from AA.  There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that my drinking days were over.  And besides, I’m a spiritual guy.  I’ve got a guru for crying out loud.  So I left.

For ten years as it turned out.

What I know now is that I was still running.  Avoiding all that AA represented––including the unique fellowship of love and acceptance found nowhere else in the world, if you ask me––was avoiding the call of my heart to go ever deeper within.

Health, I’ve discovered, is growing the ability to respond with love to whatever life presents.  There is no finish line.  We’re either busy living or busy dying, to paraphrase Dylan.  Denial of this reality is messy.  Unmanaged fear always harms.

One day my beloved said, “Ever think about going to a meeting?”

So I did.  Imagine someone spending a decade trying unsuccessfully to hit a bullseye only to discover his eyes had been closed the entire time.  Humbling is hardly the word for what I felt about the humanity I had forsaken and the price I was paying for it.

I needed two things: AA in my life, and God at the center of it.

That’s when I started to learn what sobriety really is: a sacred opportunity to take responsible for my myself––my thoughts, my feelings, my actions––my entire life in other words.  The payoff is an ever more peaceful heart, and a new friendship with the feeling I was born with and misplaced along the way: joy.

Not drinking, and a certain ruthlessness about anything that stands in the way of dying happy, is the price of admission.