What’s It Take To Be Sober 35 Years?

What’s it take to be sober 35 years?  Probably every recovering alcoholic on earth knows the cliché answer: Don’t drink; don’t die.

Sobriety, when it means abstinence, has always been easy for me.  I knew from day one of recovery that my long romance with drinking and dope smoking was over.  There was no question that I would never use again.  In fact, upon signing up for treatment, the very first thing I said to myself was, “Thank God.”  Of course, not an hour later I also said, “Fuck, how am I going to get high now?” 

I needn’t have worried. 

Since addiction is the attempt to escape pain, the number of ways we can seek that escape are all but endless.  Eating, ping-pong, anger, clothes, hoarding, porn, cross-word puzzles, you get the picture.  The biggest escape of all, however, just might be our addiction to beliefs, especially the belief that other people and outside circumstances are responsible for how we feel —the most pernicious addiction on earth, if you ask me.  What punch in the nose hasn’t started for that reason?

The most valuable gift of addiction is despair, the realization in every fiber of our being—body, mind, spirit—that if we don’t make a fundamental shift in our approach to life, undesirable outcomes are the only sure thing, including the reality that our heart’s deepest aspirations will go unfulfilled.  

Surprisingly, that can be good news if we allow the pain of it to guide us.  That pain can birth a passion to go to any lengths never to be in that situation again.  

My passion has led me to a never-ending exploration of some of life’s juiciest questions.  Here are two of them:

• What is the purpose of life, and how does the universe work?
• What is health so that it applies to every person who has ever lived or will ever live, and what are the practices essential to fulfilling that definition of health?

Because I find no meaningful two-bit answers, years of reflection, testing and falling on my face have helped me to grow a framework that allows me to address in a soul-affirming manner pretty much whatever presents itself.  How effective I am at employing that framework is another question.

All from not drinking and not dying.