Do the Thing You Don’t Know How to Do

I’m grateful for a Friday morning. I’m grateful for a super rainy night. I’m grateful for the coffee sitting next to me. I’m grateful for the chances and grateful for the way the world keeps spinning. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Mystery ?? Button

song of the week:

No struggle this week. No warring factions in my head over whether “Alison” is too personal, or “Space Cowboy” is a little too long and maybe a little dated. One of the things I like about this song is that it has no secret meaning and no sappy emotional content, just a pretty perfect command going into a weekend:

Me personally, it being Friday, I’m definitely DTC.1 What does that look like? It looks suspiciously like a super-tired lawyer maybe eating Chinese food and watching YouTube videos about how civilizations end. But this song is not a meaningless paean to having a freaky Friday, it’s a harbinger of something to come, something that we hope can be restored to it’s former greatness, of what am I speaking?

It’s Breakfast with an Alcoholic, baby.

After much longing and consultation, we are making plans to re-launch the podcast. I’m lucky to have some very thoughtful and very cool sponsees, we’ve learned an awful lot together, and I sometimes like to jokingly ask, “are you sure you wanted to get this sober?” What are we going to do on said podcast? Will there be all of that nonsense talk about Planet of the Apes and the Alcoholic Lightning Round? Of course.

But mostly, we’re going to talk about how we got sober and how we stay sober. To that end, our plan is to march through the Steps and share how we worked them, what helped us grasp some of the central concepts in each Step and what happened when we did them.2 We’re still going to do interviews with rando alcoholics and addicts , but we’re also going to invite you, the hopefully listening audience, to participate with us.

But wait, you ask, what does the sotw have to do with the podcast, what is it a harbinger of? I guess it’s been a while since we produced an episode:

If you make your way to the 11-minute mark, that’s about where the Alcoholic Lightning Round begins, and this one contains one of my favorite questions:

“What is the best song by the band Wang Chung?

You now know the answer to this. (Please see above). We are excited to be re-launching the podcast, we’ll probably start releasing episodes right after Labor Day, so keep your ear to the ground on that. In case you wanted to start brushing up in preparation for the re-launch:

Why am I so excited? I loved doing the podcast, it does partially fulfill my long-held game show host ambitions, although it pays substantially less. Part of what I love about the podcast is the origin story—-which does involve what I believe to be a direct communication from my Higher Power. I was standing, semi-naked in the locker room at the gym I belong to one day in 2022 and suddenly a thought, almost a fully-formed sentence, just popped into my head:

Do the thing you don’t know how to do.

I talk to myself pretty regularly, and I think the level of self-banter is actually pretty entertaining and even witty. However, this is not how I speak to myself. First, I usually begin said communications by calling myself by my given name or the secret nickname, this communication did not start this way. Also, my self-communications are usually more profane and typically don’t just involve commands. This instruction did not feel organic; It wasn’t the kind of thing I think, it wasn’t said the way I would say it.

Do the thing you don’t know how to do.

Did this mean that I should hang out a shingle and give general surgery a try? No. I pondered the source of the mysterious communication, as well as it’s meaning. I had been talking with a friend about an idea that I had for a podcast, I had come up with the name while I was on the way to a diner to meet an alcoholic friend of mine. As I tried to understand the imperative that had been issued, one thought zoomed to prominence over all of the other crazy products of the hamster-wheel,

“I could start a podcast.”3

It was great fun and I learned a lot—you can plot the course of my learning as you listen to the horrific sound quality of the first episodes. Despite super skillful editing by a talented friend, well, when you’re trying to record someone talking with a shitty microphone in a super-noisy diner, the results are about what you’d expect.

Was starting the podcast an essential part of your sobriety? Do I need to start one to say sober?

When one surveys the media landscape, it would be hard to conclude that the world needed another alcoholic doing a podcast. And yet, I reached exactly that conclusion. No, seriously, doing the podcast was not a critical element of my sobriety, but the changed thinking that led me to do it was.

During my illustrious drinking career, I had very definite ideas about the way the world was supposed to work, the way other people were supposed to conduct themselves and how they should think about and treat me. I was often disappointed by the way things actually worked out and the cute little carafes of Sauvignon Blanc were how I reconciled things in my head. I also had very definite ideas about my own life and what was supposed to happen, mostly involving ascending the mountain-top that was my career.

That’s not exactly how things turned out. One of the things I dealt with in early sobriety was the feeling that my life had already pretty much ended, I was just waiting for all of the mistakes and missteps and failures to catch up with me and deliver one more resounding blow—like falling in an elevator. The command I received in the locker room that morning was really a command to begin living my life again. Doing the things I didn’t know how to do was the doorway to my sober life.

My active drinking career highlighted a lot of things I didn’t know how to do:

Be honest with myself.

Understand my own motivations and needs.

See my proper place in the world.

Appreciate my own quirks.

Believe that I’m enough for the world, as-is.

One of the astonishing, liberating things I learned in sobriety, perhaps the key to my joy and happiness, is this:

You get to write your own story.

That’s what we all do, everyday, we write the book of ourselves. I’m sorry, I stole that idea from this song:4

Not to be trite, but I think that’s the real work of recovery: Rewriting the narrative of our lives. The journey back to ourselves does make for some epic adventure writing, but the more important part of this project is re-writing the main characters—starting with the alcoholic at the center of it all.

The Big Book says that willingness is one of the essential personality traits in recovery—and that is very, very true. You have to be willing to re-examine your life, test the assumptions that had been in place (likely wrong or outdated) and do things differently. That’s not easy; actually, it’s quite challenging and can be frustrating and even a little lonely. But the results are magnificent.

I guess I had enough faith to believe that foreign voice in my head, that morning in the Equinox locker room. It never occurred to me that it could be a set-up, like Lucy holding the football and urging Charley Brown to run up and kick it. It wasn’t. The little risks I took, the small steps of putting myself out into the world in different ways, begin to pay dividends almost immediately. See, it wasn’t what I did that mattered so much. As much as I liked to believe that the podcast could alter the course of human civilization, judging by the metrics, that hasn’t happened yet. Of course, that’s not the important part.

The important part is the willingness required to “Do the thing you don’t know how to do.” I was really being instructed to be open and willing and that has resulted in a waterfall of dividends. Not the kind that can be converted into additional equity or can create tax liabilities, a waterfall of peace and calm and happiness and joy. Doing the thing I don’t know how to do has generated serenity.

I don’t know how anything actually works around here. But here’s a small thing I’ve learned, if your glass is full of the wrong stuff, you can’t fill it up with the right stuff. The universe seems kind of strict about this. Doing the things I don’t know how to do forced me to question and then abandon a lot of my preconceptions. It forced me to consider who I really was. It showed me the things that mattered to me. It forced me to pour out the glass and wait patiently for the Universe to refill it.

Don’t worry, it does.

I like to think I’m lucky, that I’ve had the great, good fortune to encounter all of these lovely people who have moved me from point to point to point in my life, giving me the lessons that are necessary. I’m wrong. This is just the way the Universe works, when I’m humble enough to let it do its thing. None of it has been easy, pouring out that glass was pouring a version of myself onto the pavement and watching it disappear. The hardest part comes after emptying that glass out, waiting for the refill is completely excruciating.

During the drinking days, I would get very, very annoyed when my glass sat empty for too long (more than about 90 seconds). I will tell you something I’ve learned in my 4.75 years of sobriety, when I turn over the bartending to the Universe, that glass is always full.

Do the thing you don’t know how to do.

Happy Friday. I hope everybody Wang Chungs tonight.