Grateful and Willing

I’m grateful to be up super early on a Friday morning. I’m grateful for sitting in the inky dark and listening to the wind. I’m grateful for letting go of what isn’t meant for me. I’m grateful for seeing the path. I’m grateful to be sober today.

Mystery ?? Button

song of the week:

This one was wardrobe-connected. The song of the week selection is chaotic to put it mildly, wildly veering from song to song, crossing genre boundaries, and, not to complain, but it does place a strain on me. Sometimes, there will be a white-light shining on a certain song and I will spend the week composing the essay in my head around the many lessons that can be learned from these very wise songs, and a lot of the time it even has to do with alcoholism and recovery.

But then, riding a caffeine-fueled wave of exuberance and zeal, I sit at this keyboard and I just can’t bring myself to do it. That is why this song is not the song of the week more often:

Anyway, as I traversed midtown in the a.m. yesterday, dodging tourists and scowling at slow walkers, and maybe listening to Bananarama, I caught sight of myself in the window of the Paris Baguette at 41st and Broadway: I was wearing a blue blazer with a sweater underneath, a checked shirt, lighter colored khaki pants and white sneakers. I shook my head in disbelief. I knew who I had become:

Daryl F***ing Dragon.

The Captain in The Captain and Tennille. You heard this song roughly everywhere in the middle-70’s. I mean everywhere. I remember hearing it on the transistor radio of an Iowa City Transit System bus driver (he had it hanging by the strap on the fan arm. The television interviews were pretty hilarious because Toni Tennille was charming and beautiful and engaging and Captain Daryl was just, well, wearing that captain’s hat and a blue blazer without any real discernible reason.

That was not the look I was trying to capture, but we had a busy day ahead, so the only option was forward. I don’t want to go too far afield, but there is a mild controversy playing out over my grandparent name. To be clear, I was asked if I had a preference for the name my astonishing grandson might use to affectionately seek my assistance in skirting some unreasonable rule imposed by his parents or covertly obtaining some item or comestible that was being denied him. After being asked, and I do want to emphasize that I was asked, I did not raise this topic myself, I said,

I think it should be “Skipper.”

My daughter so far says “no.” In the interest of family harmony, I’m not pushing the issue right now, and also, the plan was always to go directly to the child on this, I’m not looking for the parental sanction. By the way, I get to spend next weekend serving in a semi-custodial role for the young lad and couldn’t be more excited. I see this as the first opportunity to begin the his education and we will likely start with why the Designated Hitter Rule is just garbage and ruining baseball.1

I had the opportunity to qualify at a meeting last weekend—and not just any meeting. It’s a meeting called “No One Left Behind,” and it’s exclusively on Zoom. When I moved to New York in 2020, during the tail end of my first year of sobriety I began going to this meeting every day at 12:30pm. Everyone was a bit shell-shocked by the onset of the pandemic and adjusting to the new reality of Zoom AA meetings. I remember qualifying at that meeting on the occasion of my first anniversary of sobriety.

You might have already guessed this, but I often don’t strictly follow rules or guidelines. I’m a lawyer, so this can get dicey quick and I try to limit this to my personal life, as opposed to what I do on behalf of clients. Anyway, people will often advise taking it easy during that first year of sobriety. Well, I sold the house I was living in, ended a relationship and decided to make a major move to a city where I had never lived and didn’t know that many people. During the Pandemic.

I look back and don’t know how I made it to October 22nd of 2020 still sober. I have a much better grasp on how my sobriety grew from that point and turned into more than five years of renewal and change. Here’s what I did:

• I got a sponsor and listened to him

• I went to AA meetings and listened to people with a lot of sobriety talk

• I read the Big Book

• I worked the Steps

• I read the Big Book some more

• I developed a sense of gratitude

Back during the dark days of 2021, this meeting at 12:30 pm on Zoom was often my only real activity of the day and sometimes my only real contact with other people. I sat in my kitchen and sometimes ate lunch while I listened to people describe how they had gotten sober and how they were staying sober. That meeting was a lifeline.

I was really excited to have the chance to tell my story again at this meeting—especially since this meeting had played such a significant role in helping me navigate early sobriety. I kind of wish I had copies or recordings of my different qualifications over time—I think it would be fascinating to see the evolution in my thinking. From plaintively complaining that if other people could only do what they were supposed to, my path to sobriety would be much easier, to finally seeing that I was the problem. Well, it would be fascinating to see that.

I think the fundamental challenge of recovery is not stopping drinking or using, it’s changing the way one thinks.

Pretty much completely.

I don’t plan out too much what I’m going to say, I like to see where things go. I found myself talking about gratitude, how doing a gratitude list helped me slowly change my perspective on the world and my place in it. I talked about my ten years of failed efforts to get sober and the reason behind every single relapse:

I didn’t believe there was a life I could live without drinking.

For sure, there were other obstacles and issues, but that inability to imagine being able to live life without drinking is what kept me tethered to all of those lovely bars in my neighborhood. In those dark days of 2021, it wasn’t clear what was going to happen in the world and there was even less certainty around what was going to happen to me. I didn’t have a job, the sports industry wasn’t doing much hiring and I was starting over in a new city as a 60-year old.

I’m not going to retell all of the stories about how beautiful people improbably showed up in my life to help me get to where I needed to go, like stepping stones across a stream. What unlocked all of that for me was gratitude. Building a sense of gratitude helped me find the meaning in sad and disappointing outcomes, helped me to see that I was actually taking some very tentative steps on the right path (finally).

But a grateful heart is not enough. It was the hard work of the Steps and ingesting the true lessons of the Big Book that helped drive the insane clowns from the sewers of my brain. The key to that hard work is willingness. When I first got drunk at Deak Rummelhart’s house, besides the trampoline, I saw a white light—this was how life could be if I just drank every day. I saw the same white light when I finally understood the passage about “Willingness:”

It was only a matter of being willing to believe in a power greater than myself. Nothing more was required of me to make my beginning.

I’d read that passage plenty of times and it never really registered. But after the necessary foundation of time not drinking, time spent thinking, time spent reading the Big Book and listening to other alcoholics, that message finally found fertile ground. I like to think of the daily gratitude lists I was writing as seeds in my garden. When carefully tended and planted in the right place, those seeds of gratitude sprout into something magnificent that shoots out of the soil:

Willingness.

It was spending those often lonely, dark mornings coming up with things I could be grateful for outside of coffee or warm socks or whatever, that tended the garden that eventually produced willingness. As I wrote those gratitude lists every morning I started to see that there was a place for me, that there was a path for me, there was a life I could lead and build and be proud of. I saw the lessons I needed to learn. I let myself feel things and finally saw that even the most desolate moments pass. I started to notice that the sun came up every single day.

As things began to come into focus, it was almost impossible to not feel that sense of willingness. I saw there was so much beauty, so much meaning, even in moments of loss. It was kind of impossible to not acknowledge the possibility that there was a power greater than myself in the Universe. And even more importantly, I realized for the very first time that his power was capable of restoring me to sanity, helping me lead a sustainable, sober, happy life.

So much has changed in my life over the last 5 years. So much. That was my takeaway after qualifying, that the life I lead today was unimaginable four years ago, and certainly 10 years ago. It was gratitude and willingness that finally helped me find the path back to myself.

To be honest, I don’t think anyone other than me knew who Daryl Dragon was yesterday, much less how he dressed in the 1970s. To be honest, I don’t really care what that adorable little boy calls me. I’ve been given a miraculous gift that 10,000 gratitude lists wouldn’t be enough to deliver sufficient praise and thankfulness. Fortunately, that’s not the job. Here’s all I have to do: When the sun comes up tomorrow, and it will, I just have to find three or four things to be grateful for—and then my heart will do the rest.

Happy Friday.