MycoolFitz

Intriguing that you would mention this, very insightful. It brings to my mind a famous saying of Achaan Cha, the great Thai monk. He would hold up a tea cup and say, "To me this cup is already broken." Everything is like this, already broken. Why does this upset us? When we think something is not broken, we think it is intact, that it is ours, so we have to protect it. And then when it turns out we cannot protect it, that we lose it, that it breaks, that it is taken from us — as everything always is — we go to pieces. We feel as if the world is not a safe place. We become paranoid and stressed out. But if we knew, with Achaan Cha, that things were already broken, that the nature of things — and of ourselves, especially and most importantly ourselves — is brokenness, and we could learn how to embrace and accept that, then I think we can live a happy life, appreciating the preciousness of what comes to us and goes from us. We'd know that whatever comes to us is always a precious and temporary gift. And whatever goes is peaceful in its going. Everything we lose makes way for something else. Every loss is an opening. Even death is an opening. So even though we might grieve, we are not surprised or shocked. We knew the cup was broken to begin with. It was always broken. It could not have existed at all had it not been broken from the start.

On another level I came to realize that the way I had stacked my books next to my plant holder was a precurser to an accident that was, as a result, inevitably going to happen in time. I rearranged my books and plant and then did a quick risk assessment of my apartment and made a few other preventative adjustments. One does not cling to the idea of perminance but neither does one need to precipitate endings through thoughtlessness.

This is a convoluted path to the story of my relapse a few years ago. After almost a year of sobriety, one evening I "just" picked up. My shocked, confused, angry, sad, disillusioned wife (now ex) asked me "what the hell was I thinking? Why did I choice to drink after all this time?" I replied "I don't know what I was thinking or why I did it, I just did." I realize now that I spent that year both not drinking and establishing precursers to what was going to follow by thinking that the behavior of not drinking was enough while I ignored all my other behaviors and thoughts that I was stacking like books against my stand of sobriety. Today I see that my recovery is a package deal that encapsulates the totality of what I think, how I act and who I am. While my end is inevitable I can be the person I want to exit as. My dad, after almost 60 years of alcoholic drinking, sobered at the age of 75 and died 10 years later a sober man. I can be that.