Decisions, decisions...

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

From "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost, Interval 1920

One of the first lessons I learned in my recovery program was that the two driving forces behind every addict's disease are fear and resentment. The outward manifestations might be anger, aggression, sadness or melancholy, promiscuity, belligerence or excessive boisterousness, but these two simple drivers make the addict's engine run. I've run across nothing in the intervening months to make me question the validity of this postulate.

Active addicts are infamous for our indecision about anything other than feeding their addiction. We fear making the wrong decision, trapping ourselves somehow, selecting a course that will eliminate all other possibilities. We fear choosing a course that will bring us pain, or hurt those we care about. Some get so hung up in these fears that they lose touch with reality - there is a reason that mental illness and addictions are so often connected.

And we addicts resent, in addition to real and imagined transgressions against us in the past, those few decisions we did make that didn't turn out as we hoped, or, more often, decisions we didn't make, leaving us, looking through our fun-house fractured prisms, living in a spot seemingly not of our choosing, that we don't like, and that we can't see our way out of. Healthy people find themselves in these same spots and situations, but generally find a healthy way beyond the snag. Sometimes not, in which case we hope you'll join us at a meeting when you're ready...

By the way, the transgressions against us that are real are worth exploring. This is true for everyone - addicts and non-addicts alike. The news of the day is Tiger Woods' pseudo apology pseudo press conference on Friday. For what it's worth,I do believe he's sorry - about equally for his transgressions against his family and for being caught, err...stupid. I do believe that sex addiction is a real malady, but with less of the chemical component than drugs or alcohol. Probably more on line with kleptomania or gambling or shopping addictions. Point being, all of these behaviors, regardless of the chemical component, are unhealthy and often pathological responses to past experiences...

And Tiger Woods, for all his fame and glory, had one pretty fucked up childhood. Maybe not as bad as Michael Jackson or Danny Bonaduce or some other celebrity kids who are pressed too hard too young, but bad enough. We hosted some young golfers at a youth tournament Tiger played in when he was 14. These kids were 17 or so if I recall, and scared to death of him. Here was this robotic superhuman black kid kicking butt in a white man's sport, with controlling manipulative parents driving every aspect of the show. No pressure on anyone there. Children who are not allowed to be children, and in Tiger's case not allowed to develop normal relationships with other children and those of the opposite gender, will wind up with behavioral problems. He is not the first celebrity who counter-balanced his seemingly superhuman public self-control with theoretically private and unbelievably destructive behavior. That he chose to act his out with some pretty skanky ass women, many of questionable repute, seems the classic enactment of the Madonna-Whore complex, which is not one generated by a healthy upbringing. In this analogy, by the way, the Madonna would be either his wife or perhaps his mother. So...

Enough about my golf idol. I hope he makes it back, and soon. I'll still use golf as my Saturday afternoon nap inducer, with or without him. Without him, though, I don't usually last more than 10 minutes, vs. the 30 or so I can usually keep my eyes open when he's on his game. Its all bout me, ya know?

The opening quote was about paths taken and not taken, and we discussed decisions, fears and regrets. Again, I think that there's not much difference in the life experiences of healthy folks and addicts. We all have victories and defeats, fears and resentments. The difference is that the active addict drinks or drugs to run away from them, while the healthy person confronts and deals with them, sets them aside, and moves on with life. There's a middle ground, too,where most folks live on the bell curve of healthy functionality. In this segment, the actor as often as not compartmentalizes life traumas, at least temporarily, in a way that allows them to generally operate normally without developing destructive behaviors. Some are fortunate enough to make it out of this life without ever having to deal with these traumas or suffer any measurable damaging effect. Others are able to pull them out at various intervals and deal with them one by one in a timely and healthy manner, growing stronger through introspection, understanding and increased self-awareness. Others might well have the trauma manifest itself suddenly or damagingly at some point, seemingly with no specific trigger. This is why we have shrinks...

My shrink told me that the average human life runs something like this: Our first 25 years or so, our parents screw us up big time, owing largely to the reality that children don't come with instructions. The second 25 years or so we live the effects of this upbringing, settle into our place on the aforementioned bell-curve of mental health, and as often as not go about fucking up our own kids who, amazingly, also arrive without instructions. Somewhere around mid-life, the toxic waste of the first segment, as often as not, begins leaching up to the surface and manifesting itself in ways large and small. For the handful who are self-aware from an early age, lucky enough to have been raised by insightful and generous parents, and who have dealt with life's experiences fully and completely as they arrived, they continue on their steady and generally satisfying path. We all know folks like this, although not many, and envy them deeply. Don't. Envy is ugly and unproductive, and leads to resentment, which leads to...

For those in the middle (of the population and of life), this can be an interesting or depressing time. Henry David Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation." I think that this describes well a significant majority of those in the middle of the bell curve, and virtually all of those on the active addict side. I have a vision on the periphery of my mind of a poem or movie or television episode or painting or some-such, can't pull it up right now - of armies of gray men with briefcases and fedoras marching listlessly through the hum-drum of modern industrialized life. Like the Japanese "salaryman," you know? None of us know one of those previously mentioned enviable people who fit this mold, do we? I know I don't. But I know a fair bunch like this in the middle, and a lot on the active addict side, marching listlessly through life, feeling trapped by decisions they did and didn't make. This is the segment and period in which suicides go up, divorces happen, addictions manifest themselves or are exacerbated. But this is also the time where many find spirituality (real and imagined), set aside destructive behaviors and take up healthy ones, make radical changes in lifestyle or career to take control over lives that prior seemed to be controlling us. Welcome to my world...

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way." Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Decisions, decisions... I've said before and will say again, that where we are at any instant of our lives is the aggregate of the circumstances we've been exposed to and the decisions we've made in response to those circumstances. Based on that viewpoint, and on decisions I've made in the past year or so, here's what I know about me today: (1) I will not stand still, for I would die. (2) I will not go back, because I cannot. (3) I will not let life dictate to me, because I refuse to be a victim. (4) I will not fear the future nor resent the past, because neither are productive.

These are all attitudinal changes, but significant I believe, because the attitude we bring to the enterprise of living goes a long way toward determining our effectiveness in and appreciation for the act of living. Where I will go, and what I will do, as I travel through these middle years remains undetermined at this point, and that's a decision I've made as well. I'm tightening and provisioning my vessel, and one day in the not distant future, when the wind is right and the sun up bright and my affairs in order, I will cast off. And I may check in with you from time to time. Or, maybe not...