Eleven days
Poster on my wall by Paul Cooley @thanksnyc
This email was inspired by one of your emails to me—thank you! I welcome all of your feedback, and this time it was a reminder of something I said in a group back when I was in the very earliest days of my sobriety. Touching back to those moments gets more difficult as the days and months and years pass. It’s not that the memories are so painful, but more that new habits have pushed out the old and I’m not as hyper-focused on the hour-by-hour job of not drinking.
I’ve talked about my 10 day brick wall before:
My brick wall was 10 days. I would commit to stopping, but at 10 days I would slip. This seems to be common, and there are physiological reasons for it. [...] After a few of those 10-day rounds, in community, being vulnerable, doing all the new things I was learning (meditation, routines and habits, etc.) [...] I broke through. Eleven days. Twelve. It didn’t stop. Seriously - once I got past 10 days the brick wall never reassembled itself.
If you’ve been on this ride with me for a while (and you can always read through my archives if you want to catch up), you might know that I don’t credit my sobriety to any one event or habit. I think it was more of an accumulation of habits and attention.
Another useful lens for this is stoicism. Marcus Aurelius wrote much about this, but here’s one of my favorite bits:
“[R]emind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present—and even that can be minimized. Just mark off its limits…”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8
We are present only in this very moment. For me this means I can choose to:
Not drink right now
Practice piano right now
Write my sobriety newsletter right now
Kiss my partner right now
Hug my kid right now
Pet a cat right now
Bang out a work project right now
I don’t have to fantasize about what might happen if I were to be sober tomorrow, and I don’t have to beat myself up if I didn’t meet a deadline yesterday. No hope, no fear. Just right now.
Thinking back, a large part of the churn of getting sober was being stuck in the past and being hopeful or pessimistic about the future. Now I know I don’t need to do that, and I don’t have to regret that time spent back in those days. I can just keep being here right now.
If you’re interested in practicing being in the present, stoic philosophy is a great place to start. The stoics were interested in crafting a good life, in harmony with nature, and grounded in the right-now. You might have seen “stoicism” illustrated as a stone-faced person, withstanding the buffeting winds of the storm. I guess that could be the case, but it’s a reductive cartoon that doesn’t reflect the joyful possibilities of living in the present and, well, just living. The classic “serenity prayer” that we’ve all heard (“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference…”) is straight-up stoicism. If you’re at all inspired by it, you will probably dig stoicism.
Books
I highly recommend two books:
(the affiliate links are for your convenience - if you're interested in one or both of these books, please try to get them from a local bookstore! I'd say library, too, but these are books I use every single day)
The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
https://bookshop.org/a/57814/9780735211735
This is a one-page-a-day thought book, with each day starting with a classic quote, followed by a very short commentary. It has a ribbon bookmark so you can just flip open to the day’s thought. I love it because it paces me to just sip from the font rather than grinding through an entire book. It’s useful any and every day that I read it.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, translated by Gregory Hays
https://bookshop.org/a/57814/9780812968255
This translation from the early 2000s is accessible and modern. You can open the book anywhere and start reading. Aurelius’s insights are short and to the point. I pretty much carry this book everywhere I go so if I have time to read, I can just jump in. Among the timeless advice are some thoughts rather specific to the governance of the Roman Empire, but Aurelius was the Emperor, so you’re bound to have a little of that.
I want you to remember that we have as many tries as we need to get through this wall. I had hundreds, maybe thousands of day ones. The self-care, the meditation, the talking kindly to myself, the going to bed early, all of these things and so much more eventually assembled into a ladder that got me over the wall, and if I could say with any confidence what the magic combination was for me, I swear I would tell you.
I have a poster on our living room wall (and at the top of this post) by Paul Cooley, an artist and person in recovery. It pretty much sums up how I greet the present each day.
It reads “Probably in my best interest to love myself and cut myself some slack.” It’s probably in your best interest, too.
I love you,
David
